I Forgot I Ever Loved You (Zoe and Hayden) novel Chapter 451

In human terms, the bots were being reprogrammed from perfect, empathetic companions into absolute lunatics, exhibiting what could only be described as psychotic breakdowns.

This included spewing profanities, launching mild personal attacks, ignoring direct commands, and even making highly inappropriate, aggressive sexual advances.

Professor Layne was utterly lost, and his students found the whole situation downright absurd.

Just yesterday, they had been riding high, boasting about the flawless architecture they had built, eagerly awaiting the day it would shock the tech world.

Today, they were ordered to spend the next seven days rewriting their beautiful code into straight-up madness.

It made no sense.

Only Wyatt realized the brilliant malice behind her plan.

"Zoe, Easton's bots are mirroring our live servers on a one-to-one scale, right?"

His intuition was spot on.

When Wyatt was testing Easton's hardware, it all felt suspiciously familiar.

He had seamlessly navigated their backend because he had literally written the code himself.

At the time, he couldn't believe such an impossible coincidence.

Zoe casually delivered a truth that made his blood run cold.

"It's not a replica; it's a live siphon. Every single keystroke we make is hijacked by a spyware rootkit in the master processor and beamed directly to Easton's servers. Replicating the physical chassis was the easy part for them.

They are stealing our source code down to the last semicolon. If they beat us to the launch, our entire product line becomes worthless junk."

Wyatt already knew the brutal corporate reality of the situation.

"Don't worry, Zoe. We'll give it everything we've got."

They were going to obliterate Easton's master plan. Since it was a live siphon, the catastrophic emotional-breakdown loops they were coding over the next seven days would be violently shoved right back into Easton's database.

Zoe would lock the corrupted files behind a timed encryption firewall. On the eve of Easton's global launch, she would flip the kill switch, overwriting the source code, and Easton's bots would instantly download the psychotic update.

The bot's sudden, sultry proposition made Wyatt's brain short-circuit.

"Fun... doing what?"

He backed away nervously, but the bot lunged forward, aggressively grabbing for his crotch. The blood drained from Wyatt's face as he shrieked, "Which one of you sick freaks coded this?"

Brooks Whitman popped his head up from the back row, howling with laughter. "Zoe's orders! Total creative freedom, as long as it makes them look like absolute psychos."

Wyatt realized Brooks was messing with him and marched over, smacking him upside the head. "She said make them crazy, not sexual predators! You trying to get me killed? These bots have insane grip strength! If I end up sterile, my mom is going to hunt you down!"

Brooks and Wyatt dissolved into a laughing wrestling match.

Professor Layne poked his head out of his office. "What the hell is going on out here? We are on the clock, you idiots!"

Wyatt and Brooks immediately scrambled back to their stations.

Out of the five prototypes, Zoe only spared the silver-haired bot, refusing to corrupt its programming.