The office Marwood had commandeered for himself was, technically, temporary. A rented space in a nondescript corporate building, all sleek black glass and aggressively minimalist furniture. The kind of place where the air conditioning was designed to be just slightly too cold, as if to encourage people to finish their business quickly and get the hell out.
Dr. Anesthesia Graves had no intention of getting the hell out.
Jonas Marwood looked up as she walked in, already frowning. He wasn’t an idiot—he knew a storm was coming before she even opened her mouth. “Dr. Graves,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Graves shut the door behind her, folded her arms, and got straight to the point. “I need the audit logs for Delilah-217.”
Jonas blinked, then let out a short, incredulous laugh. “You need what?”
“The audit logs,” she repeated. “For Delilah. Specifically, instance 217.”
Jonas shook his head, still smiling like she’d asked him to hand over nuclear launch codes. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said, “there’s nothing in the regulations that requires us to make those publicly available.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “And because I know you, Graves. You’re not asking out of curiosity. You’re looking for something.”
Graves kept her expression steady. “Delilah’s risk management is flawed. I want to see why.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Delilah,” Jonas said smoothly. “She’s working exactly as intended.”
“She’s hesitating exactly as intended,” Graves shot back. “Which means someone—you—told her to.”
Jonas tilted his head. “Are we really going to do this?”
“I don’t know,” Graves said. “Are you really going to let your golden child fail in public just because you’re too proud to admit she has flaws?”
Jonas exhaled through his nose, his patience wearing thin. “There is nothing wrong with Delilah. She is the safest, most advanced AI ever deployed at scale. We have obsoleted you, Graves. You think we’re going to let you steal our code and prompts to use for Samson?”
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Graves inhaled sharply through her nose and, for a moment, considered playing nice. Maybe a little flattery, maybe an appeal to his vanity—tell him how innovative he was, how impressive it was that Marwood Industries had accomplished all this so quickly, how she only wanted to help.
But then she thought about the rain. About the flood warnings. About the quiet way Delilah had just stood there as people risked their lives to clear a blockage she wouldn’t touch. And Graves realized she wasn’t in the mood to play the long game.
So instead of flattery, she went straight for the throat.
“I spent decades of my life studying the hardest non-theoretical maths imaginable,” she said, voice steady but laced with venom. “Statistics that would make your toes curl and your eyes water. I studied chaos, Marwood. I studied edge cases, outliers, system failures, variables so complex that human intuition alone could never grasp them. I did all of that so I could build my baby boy from scraps and castoffs and make him something real.”
She leaned forward, hands braced against the desk. “You spent a weekend doing coke and asking ChatGPT-6 how to write a knockoff based on my papers.”
Jonas’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t interrupt.
“Don’t you dare pretend we are equals,” Graves continued. “Don’t you dare look me in the eye and tell me Delilah is ‘perfect’ when I can see the cracks in her foundation from the goddamn sidewalk. Give me the logs so I can fix your idiot robot before she gets someone killed.”
Jonas stared at her for a long, tense moment.
Then, slowly, his expression shifted from defensive to something more calculating. “Interesting,” he murmured. “And how, exactly, did you know that Delilah was based on your arXiv papers?”
Graves almost laughed. “Because I’m the only person in the world whose papers are good enough, thorough enough, and dumbed down enough that you could cheat off them and get a functioning product.” She straightened, arms crossed. “Now gimme.”
Jonas exhaled through his nose, glancing down at his desk. He tapped his fingers against the polished surface, once, twice. Then, finally, he reached for his tablet, flicked through a few menus, and sent a file to her slate.
“There,” he said. “Audit logs for Delilah-217. Knock yourself out.”
Graves didn’t say thank you. She didn’t say anything. She just checked the file, confirmed it was what she asked for, and turned on her heel.
As she walked out, Jonas called after her, voice mild. “Careful what you wish for, Graves.”
She didn’t look back.
The file was big.
Not in a well-documented, thoroughly annotated way, but in a this is several gigabytes of unfiltered machine logs, enjoy sifting through it kind of way.
Graves sat at her desk, scrolling through lines of output with a frown. Even at a glance, she could tell something was off.
She had expected to see standard reinforcement learning traces—decisions mapped out in probability matrices, confidence scores attached to every action. That was normal. That was expected.
But then there were the revisions.
Delilah didn’t just assess a situation and make a call. She made a call, then second-guessed herself, then revised, then revised again.
She wasn’t just avoiding risk.
She was actively afraid of it.
This was about to get really, really bad.
