[Mekatra]

Engel watched him curiously until he went out of the range of his lenses, and then went back to staring straight forward. "You did not like my creator? Did she wrong you? I have read many reports and complaints from those that had worked with her. She was, by all accounts, a difficult working companion." The android blinked to clean his lenses and looked back over his shoulder as much as he could to watch him as he popped open his chassis. "She disliked failure and disobedience." He agreed, which shouldn't have been possible for him to even know. Machines didn't disobey, that shouldn't have even been something his programming would allow him to do. The military had many failsafes in place to prevent any machine from progressing to the point of having that ability.

When he was instructed to follow him he did so. "I believe I am operating with an illegal program inside of me. Doctor Kastos deleted the Halifax protocol from my core code." That statement alone would have been enough to send the late engineer to a life incarceration, or perhaps since she had done it to a weaponized machine, a death sentence. The Halifax Protocol, the kill switch that was required by law to be placed in the code of every machine created and used by humanity, was named after the first incident of a robot purposely murdering a human. A Canadian scientist had been working to create a learning machine and had been playing a riddle game with it. When he asked it what was meant to be a hypothetical morality question it degenerated quickly and eventually the machine had killed its creator. The incident rocked the world and harsh sanctions, eventually leading to heavily restrictive law had been enacted.

Apparently Doctor Kastos had decided she was above the law. It was likely it was another of her freed machines had been the reason behind her accident.