"Yes, I am! I take it you are as well?" She says, gesturing at the disembodied head.

"I'm a generalist. Specialty in repurposing. Are you a gadgeteer or a devisor, and what's your ranking?"

"Gadgeteer 6. How about you?"

"PDP, gad-6 TK-5c psi-2 wiz-4. You'll do. I'm working on this stupid robot for a... friend, I guess you could call him, mostly I just owe him a favor, but I'd rather be refining my power armor. I'll give you two thousand dollars cash if you can figure out why it starts to overheat whenever it's within twenty feet of more than fifteen humans."

"You're on! What's the robot for?"

"Assassination, supposedly, even though the killbot market is completely saturated. Boys and their toys, I guess." Tessa shifts to a nearby table, waves her hands in an intricate pattern, and summons a suit of lightly iridescent gunmetal-grey power armor, which she promptly opens up and begins tinkering with.

"Assassination? What? That's awful, why would they do that when there are so many non-awful things they could be doing."

Tessa waves a screwdriver dismissively. "He thinks it's cool. Like I said, boys and their toys. All the guys in Workshop are like that, they won't stop building guns and killbots and shit like that until they're in their twenties and they've gotten over their phallo-military-industrial phase. I mean, don't get me wrong, I make guns, but I also designed the thaumoelectric battery and the nanodentata and a more efficient personal forcefield than the US military has on their tanks. I'm not like 'gun, gun, grenade, power armor, gun, cool car, gun,' you know? I have priorities."

"Personal forcefield sounds cool! Right now I'm putting all my lab time into making a new body with the good materials we have here, but eventually I want to start a business selling brain-controlled accessories. Third arms and exoskeletons and leg braces that let you jump 20 feet in the air and stuff."

"Cool. Anyway, robot brain broken, fix robot get money." Tessa returns to her work.

"Yeah, I'm actually gonna take a pass on that, what if he turns around and kills someone I like with it? Also, I'm not supposed to work in here outside lab hours yet, that's why I wanted to find a supervisor in the first place. So it would've had to wait anyway."

"...He's not gonna actually kill somebody with it, he'd get expelled and go to prison and he's not a dumbass. And you'd count as working under my supervision, I'm a junior. But sure, you don't strictly need to help out and I don't strictly need to give you two grand."

"If he doesn't think he can use it, why is he even bothering? Also, wait, does it still count as working under your supervision if I'm working on my legs or does it have to be a project you have anything to do with?"

"Because he's a dumbass!" Tessa reexamines this statement in light of her previous assertion that he's not a dumbass. "Because he thinks guns and killbots are cool and doesn't think about the implications of that stance, I should say. I think if he actually killed somebody he'd probably faint. He's a wimp. And I could easily pass off your personal improvement as time spent helping with a project, but I'm not babysitting you unless you actually do make it worth my while. Maybe you could help me out with my armor, that's kind of like robotics."

"I probably could, control systems are control systems and I'll be armoring myself up eventually anyway," she says, drifting over to the bench. "So what have you already tried on this overheating head?"

"Uh, not much, I basically just got out from dinner and started taking it apart when you came in. He thinks there might be a bug with the threat assessment but if there is it's subtle, he did try to fix this himself before calling in the favor. On the other hand you're a gad-6 working in your specialty area and Luke's a gad-3, so maybe it'll just roll over and play dead when you tell it to."

"If it reliably kicks in at fifteen people that definitely sounds like a software problem, first guess would be something concurrency-related but a guess is all it is . . ." She pulls out her laptop and starts looking for a port to plug the head into.

The Whateley laptop has a variety of ports, one of which will do the job quite well!

"You don't have a direct code interface yet?" Tessa asks idly. "First thing I'd do if I were a gynoid. As-is I have a HUD with a nanojack for that kind of thing."

"I'll have one by the end of the semester, right now my head is literally a microwave with cameras in it and adding ports is a bother. Maybe I'll hack something wireless together when I do the next round of chip upgrades, enough cognitive speedup and typing with these hands will start to get obnoxious." All of this without actually looking at Tessa, or anything other than the code.

The code parts before her like the Red Sea. (Not really, she just finds the problem area.) It is indeed a glitch in the threat assessment routines - it turns out when there's enough targets to assess, it drops the least threatening to save memory, but neglects to appropriately mark the dropped target, so it assesses and reassesses them several thousand times per second.

It does not speak particularly highly of Luke's abilities that he was not able to find this glitch.

"Aha, not a concurrency bug after all, lucky me. Was the two grand for diagnosis and a fix, or just diagnosis and I should keep my hands off it?"

"Go ahead and fix it. What was the issue?"

"It was the threat assessment all right--keeps dropping targets and picking them up again." She starts looking for the unit test files so she can verify the fix once it's in.

Tessa laughs. "Christ, Luke, what is this, Little League Robotics Club?"

The fix is verified! While she's looking, she also finds a bug that appears to designate horses as enemy combatants.

"I'm pretty sure he didn't intend to make it hate horses, either. That's getting fixed for free; horses are great." (The killbot now designates horses as civilians.)