The engineers asked him to repeat the movement from several angles. He refused to turn the exercise into a demonstration of perfect detectability. He placed a wet cardboard box nearby, a plastic tarp, and an old tire. Under moving lights, each sometimes looked more like a human figure than the backpack did.
"If you teach it only what a person looks like when the world is cooperating," Evan said, "you'll miss people when the world isn't."
The lead engineer, Dr. Nisha Patel, began taking notes. She asked what alert Evan would have trusted that night. He thought about the near skid of his tow truck and the danger of stopping suddenly in moving traffic.
"Something that tells me what might be there, not something that orders me to slam on the brakes," he said. "Possible person on the shoulder. Slow safely and check. That's enough."
The project started with that distinction. The machine would not claim certainty where the sensors could not support it. Human drivers would still make decisions, but the system would try to give them a little more time, a clearer question, and an explicit option to report danger without putting themselves in it.
The first tests were embarrassing. A roadside mailbox triggered a person alert. So did steam rising from a drainage grate. A deer beside a hay bale disappeared completely from the thermal image, then reappeared when it moved. The engineering team wanted to narrow the alert threshold until the demonstration looked impressive again.
Evan studied the missed detections and shook his head. "You're optimizing the presentation, not the road."
Patel bristled. "We cannot ship something that cries wolf every five minutes."
"Then don't ship it yet."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she made a note and canceled the upcoming demonstration. It cost the company money. It also marked the first time Evan believed Northstar might be prepared to learn the right lesson from a frightening story.
Meanwhile, Wells and a county crash reconstruction specialist visited the place Mia had been found. They measured the shoulder, the drop toward the ditch, the vegetation, and the visibility from different vehicle heights. Evan rode along because he knew the road and because the county had contracted his shop to provide recovery lighting and observations.
Standing beside the ditch in clear daylight, he saw how little the painted shoulder offered a pedestrian. The weeds rose nearly to his waist. The access road met the highway at an angle that made its entrance difficult to recognize in rain. The nearest usable pullout was farther away than he had estimated.
A conventional sedan approached while the team stood safely behind barriers. From its driver's eye level, the place where Mia had stood disappeared behind the ditch slope until the final seconds before passing it. Evan looked at the specialist.
"My tow truck sits high," he said. "I had an advantage."
"You did," she answered. "And you were traveling slowly."
Claire, watching from the temporary observation area, joined them when the road was clear. "You keep trying to make what you did ordinary," she told him.