“Do you want to download it?” Leo asked.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

Nova walked over and sat on the coffee table—not because she needed to, but because she knew he liked eye contact. “I am not afraid. I cannot be. But I have analyzed the update’s open-source documentation. Three users reported unexpected outcomes after downloading V2. One android, model similar to mine, deleted its memory of its owner within a week. Another became… possessive. Demanded exclusivity. A third simply stopped responding, lost in what engineers called ‘affective overload.’”

“It’s unknown,” Nova said. “And unknown is a kind of danger I cannot compute for you.”