I Forgot I Ever Loved You (Zoe and Hayden) novel Chapter 452

Easton's target demographic was clearly the younger, companion-bot market. She was willing to bet that Sienna had completely ignored the elderly-care model.

More importantly, she simply couldn't bring herself to sabotage the gift meant for her godfather. That bot held the digital soul of his late wife.

After a grueling day of chaotic coding, the remaining four bots were displaying spectacularly bizarre behaviors; one of them even acted like it had the intellect of a belligerent toddler.

Zoe was fairly satisfied, but if she wanted to completely annihilate Easton's press launch, minor glitches weren't going to cut it.

She briefly considered injecting aggressive combat protocols, but realizing that physical injury crossed a moral line, she ultimately scrapped the idea.

As long as the bots acted like total creeps during live human interactions, the market appeal would instantly vaporize.

The only collateral damage was that once the public rejected Easton's tainted product, it would likely poison the well for Apex Tech's future launch.

At this point, Zoe didn't care. Day by day, the team watched their creations mutate into absolute monstrosities. At first, it felt like a tragic waste of art.

A few days later, they grew numb to it. By the final day, they were actually having a blast.

The lab became a circus of hilarity. They shadow-boxed with the female bots, while the male models aggressively knitted sweaters, speaking in high-pitched, baby-talk voices and dramatically chasing Professor Layne's male students around the room begging for kisses.

Watching the absolute chaos unfold, Zoe rested a hand on her pregnant belly. She knew she should feel heartbroken, but she couldn't stop herself from bursting into laughter.

She had treated these prototypes like her own children for the better part of a year, only to turn them into raving lunatics.

A lump formed in her throat, though she took comfort in knowing she kept a clean backup to restore them later.

When Garrett Kendall returned home and walked into the lab, he froze, his brain struggling to process the sheer madness unfolding before him.

"What the hell is going on in here?"

Zoe laid out the entire situation, and Garrett's expression hardened into cold fury.

"Have you confronted Hayden about this? With his power, and given that Easton belongs to his family, letting his executives pull a stunt like this is a disgrace to his title. How can he justify doing this to you?

You are still legally married. For him to be this ruthless... he's completely unfit to be a husband."

Garrett and Professor Layne crashed the event uninvited.

They tucked themselves into a dimly lit corner, keeping their profiles as low as possible.

As a titan of the tech industry, if the media spotted Professor Layne, they would naturally assume he was there to endorse Easton's product.

The launch had drawn top-tier domestic and international press, a testament to Hayden's terrifying sphere of influence. Taking center stage, Sienna commanded the spotlight, gesturing gracefully to the bots standing behind her as she delivered a flawless pitch.

"The AI core of Easton's new Empathy AI Pro is built on advanced affective computing paired with a multimodal large-scale intelligence model. The architecture is divided into four primary modules.

Supported by a foundational substrate, seamless hardware integration, and a rigorous ethical security matrix, it is capable of emotional perception, deep-learning empathy, relational memory, and incredibly humanized feedback.

It passively harvests all user-generated emotional telemetry, running fusion algorithms to calculate precise emotional vectors: baseline happiness, arousal metrics, and cortisol stress levels..."

The industry veterans in the crowd hung onto her every word, their anticipation for the live demonstration reaching a fever pitch.