Control (IV 3)

Tags: Me Science fiction Stories

The control room was empty - just the quality manager and a lot of screens, buttons and levers. Even the sound was off right now, and none of the pictures moved. He was looking for a target with a high empathy reading. He stopped looking when he found an agitated woman (she seemed to be pacing) and a quiet man. Then he went to work.

It didn't take long to install version 2.7a.4 of the Empathy Organizer. It never did take long to install. It was always the trouble shooting afterwards that took time. Then he started time and observed the pair, still with the sound off. The dials and the picture told him more than the sound anyway. The PR was, that 4 was twice as fast as 3, but then, that was PR.

She walked slower, and finally sat down. His empathy reading was high, and her emotional levels were dropping below the danger threshold. Good so far. Then she suddenly jumped up and started pacing again. The quality manager immediately stopped time and started his debugging routine.

The install had been successful, and the logs showed, that it was running. So it had to be a problem with the new version itself. He engaged playback, and this time included sound. He isolated a bit of conversation.

She: "But it was so obvious! He never did it, though he promised."
He: "So you feel angry because he didn't keep his promise?"
She: " I should've known something like that could happen. Actually I feel like a fool."
He: "You feel happy"?
(Here she jumped up.)
She: "Happy? What do you mean? I could kill that little clown."

Nothing screamed at him here. So he did the usual tests, and finally isolated a misunderstanding. The thesaurus told him, that while fools were often carefree and smiling, the reason usually was, that they were less endowed with intelligence, so if you felt like a fool, you felt stupid. Aha! He checked the specs for version 2.7a.4, and discovered part of the reason it was so fast: the thesaurus wasn't checked for the last word in a sentence. That wouldn't do at all. He'd been lucky to catch the error so fast.

So he went to work again. Re-installed 2.7a.3, and tested to make sure it was running again (the woman sat down again, and stayed seated). Filed a bug report. Checked his schedule: next was that report about the 2.7b.5. One way or another they would get the Empathy Organizer to work on this species and with this intervention - they always did.

Created: 27 March, 2008 - Last changed: 27 March, 2008 - Comments (0)