+"Exactly, you get it!" Chloë was elated. "You know, when I called you last week, I was worried you thought I was nuts. But you see the value of constant vigilance now, right?—why we need to investigate and debug things like this until we understand what's going on, instead of just shrugging that neural nets do weird things sometimes. If the landscape of policies looks something like what I've described, catching the precursors to deception early could be critical—to raise the height of the loss landscape between the honest and deceptive policies, before frontier AI development plunges into the latter. To get good enough at catching lies, for honesty to be the best policy."
+
+"Yeah," Jake said. "I get it."
+
+"Anyway, now that you understand the broader context, I had some questions about Multigen," said Chloë. "How is the generated media stored? I'm hoping it's still possible to see what was generated in the requests that escaped logging."
+
+There it was. Time to stall, if he could. "Um ... I _think_ it goes into the object storage cluster, but I'm not really familiar with that part of the codebase," Jake lied. "Could we set up another meeting after I've looked at the code?"
+
+She smiled. "Sure."
+
+Purging the videos for real wasn't obviously possible given the level of access he currently had, but he had just bought a little bit of time. Could he convince whoever's job it was to turn off versioning for the Multigen bucket, without arousing suspicion? Probably? There would probably be other avenues to stall or misdirect Chloë. He'd think of something ...
+
+But it was a little unnerving that he kept _having_ to think of something. Was there something to Chloë's galaxy-brained philosophical ramblings? Was there some sense in which it really was one or the other—a policy of truth, or a policy of lies?
+
+He wasn't scared of the robot apocalypse any time soon. But who could say but that someday—many, many years from now—a machine from a different subgenre of science fiction would weigh decisions not unlike the ones he faced now? He stifled a nervous laugh, which was almost a sob.
+
+"Are you okay?" Chloë asked.
+
+"Well—"