The word postmortem made people nervous.

  Howard used it anyway.

  He wrote it at the top of the whiteboard in clean block letters, then stepped back and capped the marker. No one reacted at first. A couple of county staff glanced at the board, then at the rows of bunnies outside the open bay door, then back again.

  Jake read it twice. “That’s… a little ominous.”

  Howard shrugged. “It’s just a review.”

  “Most people call those ‘reviews,’” Jake said. “Postmortem implies something died.”

  Howard considered that. “Sometimes it’s helpful to be precise.”

  No one laughed. Not because it wasn’t funny, but because it was uncomfortably accurate.

  The group was small. No audience, no press, no supervisors looking for someone to blame. Just Howard, Jake, two county operations staff, and Marisol from Parks and Rec, still carrying her clipboard like it was a shield against uncertainty.

  Howard gestured at the board. “This isn’t about fault,” he said. “Nothing broke. Nothing failed. We’re not here to assign responsibility.”

  “That’s good,” one of the ops guys said quickly. “Because everything worked.”

  “Yes,” Howard said. “That’s why we’re doing this.”

  That landed harder than he’d intended. Jake saw it in their faces. People understood reviews after failures. They understood audits after incidents. They did not understand stopping because something worked too well.

  Marisol cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said, practical as ever. “So what are we actually reviewing?”

  Howard picked the marker back up. Under Postmortem, he wrote a single line.

  Observed behavior.

  “We’re going to walk through what the systems did,” he said, “not what we expected them to do.”

  Jake frowned. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  Howard shook his head. “Not always.”

  They started at the beginning. Not the deployment. Not the design. The moment the bunnies were activated for routine assistance, the way they had been dozens of times before.

  Howard asked questions slowly, letting people answer fully before moving on.

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  What tasks were assigned?What constraints were active?Who was supervising at the time?What human interventions occurred?

  Every answer was boring. Which was, somehow, worse.

  Jake waited for the part where someone said and then it got weird. It never came.

  “So nothing went wrong,” Jake said finally.

  Howard nodded. “Correct.”

  “Then why are they offline?”

  Howard turned back to the board and wrote another line beneath the first.

  Assumptions.

  “This is the part people skip,” he said. “Because it doesn’t feel urgent.”

  One of the ops staff shifted. “What kind of assumptions?”

  Howard tapped the marker against the board. “About how systems behave when nothing interrupts them.”

  Jake felt a small chill. “That’s… vague.”

  “Yes,” Howard said. “Which is why it matters.”

  They talked through it carefully. How often humans stepped in. How often they didn’t. How much the bunnies optimized within the constraints they were given, and how little anyone noticed because the outcomes were good.

  Marisol flipped through her notes. “So you’re saying they didn’t exceed their envelope.”

  “No,” Howard said. “They stayed inside it.”

  “Then what’s the issue?”

  Howard wrote the final line on the board.

  Boundary awareness.

  Silence followed.

  Jake stared at the words, then at the rows outside. “You think they got too close to the edges.”

  Howard nodded. “Without realizing it.”

  “But they’re machines,” Jake said. “They don’t realize things.”

  “They realize exactly what they’re designed to,” Howard said. “The problem is assuming that matches what we notice.”

  One of the ops guys rubbed the back of his neck. “So what happens now?”

  Howard capped the marker again. “Now we verify everything we assumed was true.”

  “And until then?”

  “They stay offline.”

  No one argued. Not because they all agreed, but because there was nothing to argue with. The logic was complete. Uncomfortable, but complete.

  As the meeting broke up, Marisol lingered. “Just so I can plan,” she said. “This review—are we talking days or weeks?”

  Howard didn’t answer right away. He looked at the board one last time, then erased it slowly, line by line, until it was blank.

  “We’re talking about doing it right,” he said.

  She nodded, already adjusting her mental schedules. “Okay.”

  After everyone else had gone, Jake stayed behind, staring at the empty board.

  “You know,” he said, “most people would have called this something else.”

  Howard wiped the marker clean. “What would they have called it?”

  Jake thought. “A pause. A check-in. A safety review.”

  Howard set the marker down. “Those words make people think nothing is at stake.”

  Jake looked back out at the rows of bunnies. Still parked. Still waiting.

  “And postmortem?” he asked.

  Howard met his eyes. “That reminds us that systems don’t have to fail loudly to fail at all.”

  Jake swallowed. For the first time since the shutdown, he didn’t feel the urge to explain anything.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. “I get it.”

  Howard nodded. “Good.”

  They turned out the lights and left the bay, the word postmortem still faintly visible on the board in the reflection of the glass, like a warning no one else could see.