The problem with trying to help people you'd spent your whole career treating as obstacles was that the people knew.
They always knew.
It was something Cassius had never thought about before today — before Millbrook, before the interface window and its glowing negative number and the specific quality of being 'evaluated' by a 'building' and found wanting. He had spent twenty-eight years learning to read people and had apparently spent none of those years considering that people were reading him back.
The old woman with the firewood didn't take the help.
He'd seen her struggling with the bundle — the weight of it, the way she was leaning to compensate, the slow laboring progress of someone whose back was telling her things she was ignoring. He'd dismounted. He'd walked to her. He'd said, in a voice he'd calibrated to 'helpful,' words he'd calibrated to 'assistance.'
She'd looked at him.
