Kate returned the smile. "Nelson is our technical lead. He's been on this project from day one, personally overseeing every single module."
Nelson stood beside her, mouth forming the words "You're too kind, Mr. Donaldson," but his eyebrows were already halfway up his forehead, satisfaction written across every line of his face.
He handed his tablet to a nearby assistant, and as he turned, his fingers grazed Kate's wrist. Casual. Barely there.
Kate didn't pull away.
The fourth test began.
This one was the active collision avoidance scenario. A mannequin would dart out from the roadside without warning, and the test vehicle had to identify it within a set distance and either brake or swerve.
The car started up and accelerated to twenty-five miles per hour.
The mannequin launcher fired. A figure dressed in red shot out from the side of the road.
Every pair of eyes locked onto the vehicle.
The car didn't slow down.
"What's going on?"
Someone muttered it under their breath.
At the last possible instant before impact, the steering wheel finally jerked hard to the left.
The chassis lurched violently, clearing the mannequin, but the right front wheel clipped the safety barrier.
A grinding shriek of metal on metal.
The test car fishtailed another forty feet before shuddering to a stop.
The site went silent for about three seconds.
Nigel's brow furrowed. "Engineer Gilbert, what was that?"
The smile on Nelson's face froze.
He ducked his head over the tablet, swiping through several pages of logs. Sweat beaded across his forehead almost instantly.
The executives exchanged uneasy glances.
Kate looked at Nelson, then at the test car with its scraped-up right front panel. Her expression wasn't much better.
I sat in the corner, took a sip of water from my paper cup, and said nothing.
"Nelson, what happened?" Kate asked.
"Should be a parameter drift in the perception module," Nelson said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "The sensor calibration threshold was set a little high, which caused a recognition delay of about zero-point-three seconds."
Nigel didn't follow the technical details, but "recognition delay" came through loud and clear.
"A delay? If that were a real person on the road, zero-point-three seconds is the difference between life and death."