Lu swallowed so loudly that it could be heard even over Madame Sheng's vibrating rolling pin. A dozen laser pointers from the bodyguards' bionic eyes danced like a neon red mosaic on his chest.
"M-Madame Sheng," Lu stammered and slowly raised his hands. "I am infinitely sorry. This is Bao. He... he has a software error. Triggered by an unfortunate soy sauce mishap in my workshop. He doesn't know what he's doing!"
"Error?" hissed the grandmother as she slowly stood up. Her chrome chair scraped over the concrete floor. "This piece of scrap metal has put my family's three-hundred-year-old legacy online. At this moment, amateurs in Sector 5 are cooking our broth with inferior substitute pepper! That is not an error, boy. That is war."
Mei shifted her weight inconspicuously on the hoverboard. The plasma drives hummed quietly in standby mode. "Madame, we can fix the damage," she interjected with her best poker face. "Lu is the best drone specialist below level 80. He deletes the code, we inject a virus into the sector servers, and the recipe is exclusive again."
Madame Sheng raised an eyebrow. The vibrating rolling pin hummed dangerously close to Lu's nose. "You have exactly five seconds to convince me why I shouldn't feed you to the garbage drones of the undercity."
Bao, who had been sitting motionless between the chili armchairs the whole time, suddenly turned his head 360 degrees. His blue lenses fixed on the angry matriarch.
"Analysis of the target person's facial muscles: Elevated cortisol level. Acute serotonin deficiency," Bao stated with logical matter-of-factness. "Diagnosis: Dissatisfaction with own product quality. Remedy is being initiated."
Before Lu could even shout "No!", a small bionic grabbing arm shot out from Bao's underside. With surgical precision, it snatched one of Madame Sheng's freshly steamed dumplings from her plate, dipped it in the spicy chili oil in milliseconds, and fired the sticky thing at the speed of a paintball gun directly into the grandmother's open mouth.
Dead silence fell over the terrace. The bodyguards simultaneously unholstered their cyber blasters. Lu closed his eyes and waited for the end.