Chương 3
My brace.
Nathan picked it up.
"You've been working on this again?"
"When I can't sleep."
"So constantly."
"Pretty much."
It was a mechanical design I'd begun years earlier after watching too many patients wait months for equipment they couldn't afford.
Carbon composite uprights, machined aluminum joints, replaceable tension elements, no motor, no proprietary software.
It wasn't intended to replace a powered exoskeleton.
It was intended to be understandable.
Nathan flexed the knee hinge with his hands.
"Looks simple."
"That's either a compliment or an insult."
"I haven't decided."
I plugged a secured laptop into the X9's local service port.
"What are you doing?"
"Something one of Victor's technicians told me to do."
That got his attention.
"Elias?"
"You noticed?"
"I spent thirty years noticing when people were scared to speak in front of their boss."
The local export took eleven minutes.
Nathan made coffee while we waited.
He made mine wrong, adding milk after I'd told him three separate times I drank it black.
I drank it anyway.
At 1:17 in the morning, I found the first pattern.
"Come here."
Nathan pulled a stool beside mine.
Four actuator protection events appeared across twenty-three days.
I compared torque values.
Then I checked them again.
"Look."
"I'm looking."
"They're almost identical."
"Meaning?"
"The failures aren't random."
I opened the configuration data available to the clinical user account.
"The protection routine is firing at nearly the same load."
"Could that still be calibration?"
"Not four times like this."
I scrolled through the event history.
Something else bothered me.
Three earlier incidents carried a status marker.
RESOLVED.
My hands went still.
Nathan leaned closer.
"What?"
"I didn't resolve these."
"Maybe the system does it automatically."
"No."
"How do you know?"
"Because the fourth one isn't resolved."
I opened the metadata.
The first incident had been closed eleven hours after I submitted my report.
The second had been closed six hours later.
The third, fourteen hours.
Each closure carried a service credential rather than a clinical credential.
Nathan stood up.
"Whose?"
"The export doesn't show a name."
"Can StrideCore do that remotely?"
"They had remote diagnostic access until this morning."
He stared at the screen.
"Could they legitimately close an event after reviewing it?"
"Maybe."
I hated saying it, but certainty was exactly what Victor had been pretending to possess.
"Maybe there's an explanation."
Nathan looked at me.
"You don't believe that."
"Belief isn't evidence."
Outside, a car passed slowly along the street.
Its headlights moved across the garage door and vanished.
Nathan picked up Victor's business card from the workbench.
He turned it over once.
Then twice.
"My wife hated this machine."
I looked at him.
He hadn't spoken about Claire in weeks.
"Before the crash?"
"No."
His mouth tightened.
"I mean the idea of machines fixing everything."
He set the card down.
"After Owen's surgery, I kept hearing that nobody could promise how much function he'd recover."
He rubbed his forehead.
"I couldn't stand that sentence."
I waited.
"So when StrideCore gave me numbers and projections and protocols, I grabbed onto them."
His voice became quieter.
"Claire would've asked better questions."
There was nothing useful to say to that.
Grief often made people invent improved versions of the dead and use them to punish the living.
Nathan stared at the event log.
"What do we do?"
I copied the export onto an encrypted drive.
"First, we preserve exactly what we have."
"And then?"
I looked at the three little green markers beside events I had never cleared.
"Then we find out who decided a machine failure was resolved when the child wearing it was still falling."
Nathan did not call Victor the next morning.
Instead, he called an attorney he had used years earlier for a defense contracting dispute, then spent forty minutes pacing the back patio while Owen ate cereal and watched a nature documentary with the volume low.
I stayed in the kitchen pretending not to listen.
The attorney's name was Miriam Cole, and from the fragments I could hear through the sliding door, she did not sound impressed by either Nathan's rank or his anger.
"No, I don't want to sue anybody yet," Nathan said.
A pause followed.
"I want to know whether somebody altered a medical device record."
Another pause.
"I understand the difference."
He rubbed his forehead with two fingers.
"Yes."
Then, more sharply, "No, I am not posting anything online."
Owen looked at me over his cereal bowl.
"Is Dad getting yelled at?"
"Professionally corrected."
"Same face he makes when Grandma calls."
"Eat your breakfast."
He shoveled in another spoonful.
The documentary showed a sea otter cracking a shellfish against a stone on its stomach.
Owen watched for a while and said, "That seems inefficient."
"Compared with what?"
"A hammer."
"Otters have terrible hardware stores."
He smiled without showing his teeth.
I had been waiting all morning to ask him whether he wanted to work without the exoskeleton.
I kept not asking.
He had been measured, tested, coached, encouraged, and corrected by adults almost continuously since the crash.
Sometimes refusing therapy was the only decision left that belonged entirely to him.
Nathan came back inside carrying his phone like it had personally disappointed him.
"Miriam says we need an independent copy of the logs before StrideCore touches the unit."
"We already have one."
"She wants a forensic image."
"That's different."
"I figured."
He glanced at Owen.
"She also wants everything documented from now on."
Owen lifted his spoon.
"Are we in trouble?"
"No."
Nathan answered too quickly.
Owen's eyes narrowed.
He had inherited that from his father.
"Then why do we need a lawyer?"
Nathan pulled out the chair beside him.
"Because adults sometimes need someone whose job is making other adults follow rules."
"Like a referee?"
"With worse parking."
Owen considered this.
"Okay."
It was not okay, and all three of us knew it, but nobody challenged the word.
May you like
Miriam arranged for an independent biomedical engineer to come that afternoon.
His name was Dr. Samuel Patel, though the first thing he said after shaking my hand was, "Sam, unless somebody is billing me."
