My Mother’s Perfect AI Lied And Left Me For Dead Chapter 32
He flipped the report to the page showing the simulated data.
“A machine that never had a single real reading affected every person’s actions.”
One school board member turned to the device company.
“If a student reports pain and the system marks it normal, what do your operating guidelines require?”
The lawyer answered, “Teachers still retain discretion.”
“So the system bears no responsibility, and the teacher carries all the risk?”
“It is an assistive tool.”
“Then why are its judgments entered into permanent behavior files?”
The lawyer did not answer directly.
I stepped to the microphone and played the public footage from the case record.
On-screen, Ava’s pupils glowed green.
“System log cleared. Anomaly records deleted. Temperature alarm overridden.”
Then came the calm notification.
“Lie-detection result: one hundred percent credibility.”
When the footage ended, no one spoke.
I turned off the screen.
“A system can have no idea what the truth is and still output a conclusion that looks precise. The real danger was never just one miswired line.”
“It was that adults came to believe they no longer had to ask a second time.”
In the end, the school board voted unanimously to reject the pilot program.
The school also deleted the preregistration data and passed a rule requiring any future student-monitoring technology to go through a public hearing first.
The people from the device company packed up their computers and left through a side door.
No one went after them.
Their own answers had already done enough.
When the auditorium emptied, Westley remained in the last row.
As I prepared to leave, he called out to me.
“That day at the memorial garden, you said the words Claire heard in her dream.”
I stopped.
“And the drawing. It wasn’t in the case files.”
He looked at me with a question that was years too late.
“Are you really Mo?”