Bird Logbook Entry Draft 2

''The hell is it..?''

''What, did the damn thing reboot itself again? I swear, the data terminals are more reliable than that bucket of bolts. Company's gonna have a fun time RMAing these things when they hit store shelves.''

''Not just that, but now it's... got a friend?''

''The Company sent that prototype along for the mission so we could send it out to explore and scan things. That's it. So, who decided to give this thing social skills? What the hell has it found, anyway?''

''It's this flying creature that's been sticking around the bot. Almost looks like a normal bird from back home.''

''And why didn't it just scan the bird and move on?''

''It did, actually. Added the bird to its wildlife catalog under the name 'Jade Thrinch'. Behaviors and beak structure suggest that the creature poses an incalculable existential threat to uh, small arthropods, soft-skinned fruits, and seeds. Slightly less so to us. But there's some behavioral feedback loops going on that are making the bot 'like' having it around: 

Bird sticks around BAS-10, bird gets passively scanned by the cameras, bot's AI is rewarded for a successful scan; ergo, bot likes the bird. Happens over and over, a few thousand times so far. What's really fascinating is that the reinforcement loop seems to persist through full resets, no matter how many it runs itself through. It's like whatever bug or... feature, maybe? It's like it's baseline, or something at the hardware le-''

''And we didn't test for this kind of thing before dropping it on the planet? UES didn't test for it before saddling us with the damned thing?''

''You wanted it out the door ASAP, techs didn't have time to run a full diag after getting it out of the crate. I'd have loved to pick its 'brain' about this subroutine it's running, do you think maybe I could insp-''

''Subroutine? Great, so our pet robot is doing side quests instead of what we sent it out there for.''

''Progress is slow but it's still performing its tasks - when it's not going through a hard reset cycle, at least.''

''Reboots and attachment issues. Guess we'll send it to the techs if it ever makes it back onboard. Or a therapist, I guess.''