Mrs. Everest looked at you like you had just posted a self congratulation from the wrong social media account. "That is a substack-tier take if I have ever heard one. I am already wondering if I have made a mistake. No, [i]Ms. Kade[/i], my corporation is not an ecosystem. Its function is [i]not [/i]to perish every time a dog swims the strait or a hurricane blows in the wrong frog. And [i]I[/i] am most certainly not a mere tiger, enslaved to my nature and at the mercy of global temperatures."

It was never a good feeling for your boss to immediately take a dislike to you. If there was any silver lining it was that Mrs. Everest was a famous misanthrope and recluse who surrounded herself with robots, so winning her approval had always been a distant prospect.

"And no, I am not here to tell you how to do your job," said Mrs. Everest. "I expect you to discover issues and resolve them long before they require my personal intervention. I am here to introduce you to our most classified asset, the full knowledge and capabilities of which are known to only me, your deceased predecessor - and now you." 

She was not a lady who needed to articulate a threat.

"This," she said, as the blue-haired maid laid what looked like a standard-issue Positronic Brain upon your desk - the same information processing core that animated a generation of androids. "Is Rooster. The second most powerful asset in my possession. She was built before the Red Decades and knowledge of her creation is lost. There are more like her out there and each person who has one is someone I am forced to pay attention to. There is no operating manual; your predecessors were halfwits who did not activate Rooster's full potential so I discarded their notes rather than allow them to contaminate your perspective. You may use her as you see fit, but as far as anyone else is concerned she is a simple android assistant. Do you understand?"

There was clearly more that she was not saying - but not a [i]lot [/i]more. Mrs. Everest seemed more frustrated that she had to be vague than anything.