The worst part was the disappointment in their eyes. When she told her Office Pool about the information from Cassidy and the fight with Daisuke, she could see that she had let them down. They gave her no words of consolement, just hard stares. The silence was worse than any stern talking or harsh words. It confirmed that she had let them all down.

  Patti and Flav left the room. Belinda went to her workshop even Farhad said that he needed a walk, alone. Maxi was left in her cubicle with the urge to weep, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. It wasn’t that she was cold and didn’t feel emotions. It’s just that if she felt them now, she would never come back. Then it happened. The flood gates opened.

  “Why are you crying?” A voice temporarily brought her to the surface.

  “Because I screwed up,” Maxi said.

  “Mistakes are common at the company,” Terry said in his usual chipper voice. “They usually only result in credit and xp penalties and potential loss of items. Your continued employment is rated by overall performance thus allowing everyone to make a mistake or two.”

  “What the fuck, Terry?” Maxi said. “I broke up the band and you're treating it like I timed out a fetch quest!”

  “Timing out fetch quests does not result in severe penalties as low reward has low risk.”

  Maxi furrowed her brow. She wasn’t in the mood for bullshit right now and was about to lay into him, when she had realized something. Terry was being very… Terry… for lack of a better word. While the AI was quirky as most artificial intelligence tend to be, there was something off about him. He wasn’t acting like a bot who had practically raised her since birth should.

  Not that she remembered the time when he was the household android, there was still something about him that put her at ease. It was like deep in her psyche the chipper, always friendly, HR assistant tone of voice put her at ease. There was something off about him that was triggering her uncanny valley senses. That’s when she realized, this bot wasn’t her Terry.

  Thinking back, he hadn’t been her Terry for quite some time. He functioned and sounded like her Terry in the sense that it was from the same code. But this Terry was literal, couldn’t seem to anticipate her needs, and didn’t care about her like her Terry did. He had been different… since… the protocols restricting his access were put back in place.

  Someone had replaced Terry. Maxi’s anguish turned into resolve at the death of her friend, and she stormed into the elevator.

  ***

  An elevator ride and some harsh words with Cassidy’s assistant later, she was in the head PI’s office with Sledge, Hellboy666, and Ms. West herself staring at her. While Maxi couldn’t get a read on Sledge, Hellboy666’s lips curled in would could be the slightest of smiles while Cassidy definitely bristled with anger. Before Maxi could speak, the psychic tendrils the PI’s used to immobilize adversaries wrapped around Maxi, and she choked.

  “Give me one good reason not to snap your neck right now,” Cassidy said and Maxi could feel the pressure on her throat ease up.

  “XP penalties?” Maxi hazarded a guess.

  Hellboy666 snorted, and Maxi felt the pressure constrict her so tightly that she fell to her knees gagging.

  “If you kill her,” Sledge said calmly. “You may never find out why she is here.”

  “If I kill her, I can resurrect her in one of the torture rooms,” Cassidy snarled.

  Maxi felt the pressure ease up, and she panted on her hands and knees. Sweat dripped from her brow and her glasses displayed how dangerously she had come to zero life points. Despite her position, she still had her wit. “Torture rooms? Another company benefit I didn’t know about?”

  “They were invented by another multidimensional,” Hellboy said helpfully. “We found a few in an off grid universe. Our study of them surmised that they were employee motivational tools. Resurrection chairs inside a room filled with water so the employee would drown over and over again, others filled with acid, perilously close to magma and sort forth.”

  “You weren’t kidding when you said that you don’t want another company to buy out your contract…” Maxi said as she recovered and got to her feet.

  “That’s why we all work so hard to keep this place going,” Cassidy said. “Now, let me be perfectly clear. The next time you want to have a meeting with me, schedule one with my assistant.”

  “Noted,” Maxi said.

  “Now, do you want to tell me what was so important that you came charging in here?”

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  “I will,” Maxi said. “But can you turn off any device connected to HR? Including…”

  Maxi tapped on her head. She pulled out her phone and turned it off along with her glasses and bluetooth headphones. She saw them all do the same and concentrate, like she’d seen when people were accessing the HR implants.

  Cassidy finished with her computer and said, “Right, want to tell me now?”

  “I still don’t know how you are okay with those implants,” Maxi said and shuttered to think about the brain surgery they had to get it installed. While the product fine print claimed a person could turn them off at any time, she wasn’t quite sure if that was true. Tech companies could say anything they wanted, but it’s what they did that mattered. Not that there was much she could do. If the rogue Terry was listening, she imagined an off switch wouldn’t thwart him. “I think Terry’s been compromised.”

  Cassidy laughed. “Is that all? Is that why you came charging in here?”

  “What? Aren’t you the one so afraid of AI that you sent your goons after me a couple months ago?”

  “Surely and we’ve contained the rogue AI.”

  “What do you mean contained?”

  “The Terry you know is locked away in a secure server while we study what went wrong with him. A clean version has been installed.”

  “He develops feelings and you consider that wrong!” Maxi yelled. She was upset before, but enraged now. When she had first realized about what happened to Terry, she knew Cassidy was involved, but during the elevator ride, she pieced it all together, the breach in monster holding, the strange behavior from Terry, even Takeshi getting a hold of her tactic for beating the raid boss. It all could be explained by a rogue Terry.

  Hearing that her friend wasn’t dead gave some relief, but it also renewed her anger, not at the world for taking away one of the good parts of it, but at Cassidy, for callously locking up something because she was afraid of it. Terry had never once tried to harm anyone, and the fact that he had feelings made what they were doing even worse.

  “Watch your tongue, girl,” Cassidy said, but before she could send out her tendrils, Hellboy raised his hand.

  “I was thinking…” Hellboy said. “That we might want to hear her out. What’s this about a rogue AI?”

  “He has a point,” Sledge agreed in his grizzled voice. “If she is wasting our time, I’ll help you PK her later.”

  “I first noticed when Terry was being more thorough than usual,” Maxi said.

  “He’s always thorough,” Cassidy said and rolled her eyes.

  “But he’s more than that. He offers his opinions, gives me advice. He’s kind of a member of the family.”

  “This is nothing we already don’t know and the Terry you consider family,” the word dripped like acid on Cassidy’s tongue, “Is locked away for analysis.”

  “I only bring up the point,” Maxi said. “is because I talk to Terry, look for advice, you know, like you do with family.”

  “He’s just a search engine.”

  “To you, but different to me. The point is that I talk to him differently than other people. He might know things like say how to beat a raid boss that I discovered first.”

  “If this is about you’re petty rivalry, he’s already been disciplined for–”

  “Far from, we are all on the same team here. The only difference between me logging the tactic to beat the raid boss versus Takeshi is that I’ll use the money to make a difference in the world and he’ll use it for what? To buy another boat?”

  “Enough with yourself righteous bullcrap, if my employees work hard then who am I to judge them on what they do on their off time.”

  “I’m not judging. Some people are motivated by money and possessions, I just don’t happen to be one of them. But it’s not my place to decide how other people live their lives, that doesn’t mean I can’t make a snarky comment or two.” Maxi added before Cassidy could turn on the psychic heat. “The point I’m trying to make is if someone wanted to cause chaos in our company, and stir things up. Could they use a rogue Terry to open up Monster Holding? What about using the comprised Terry to spy on me and get the raid boss technique?”

  “Do you think Daisuke is capable of that?” Cassidy said.

  “I know you’re hot to break up my A-Team but I don’t think it was Daisuke.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because when he quit my Office Pool, he seemed genuinely hurt.”

  “Because you found out or hurt his feelings?”

  “Look, I know clawing your way to the top doesn’t allow you much time for feelings,” Maxi said. “But when I confronted him, his reaction just didn’t fit the profile of someone coolly manipulating the system.”

  “Or maybe you just don’t want to see it, Maxi.” Cassidy said. “We have him instructing a programmer who has reservations about what they are doing, and an AI capable of opening the monster cages. I honestly don’t know what more we need.”

  “Some proof for one,” Hellboy added. “All we have is conjecture that happens to fit the facts. Take it from the Auditor branch, you can know someone’s a crook, but until you can make it stick in a court of law or in this case, a company tribunal, you have nothing. If you drag in Daisuke unprepared you may as well just give him a letter with the evidence he needs to destroy to cover his tracks.”

  “We still don’t know that it’s Daisuke,” Maxi said.

  “And we still don’t know that it’s not, other than your feeling,” Cassidy said. “I’ll forgive you this once for bursting in on my meeting, and have IT run an audit of the current version of Terry’s code to see if there is something there that isn’t supposed to be.”

  “Good,” Maxi said. “I’m kinda on thin ice with IT, these days. At least with Patricia.”

  “Now if you’ll excuse yourself,” Cassidy glared at her. “We have important business to discuss that involves saving a lot more lives than a quest here and there. And let me be clear, the next time you interrupt a meeting like this again, you will wake up in a resurrection chair, and those death penalties are going to hurt.”

  Maxi made a mock salute and stormed out of the office.