Spoffed

“Wait, hold up. Look.”

J paused his dealing, turned his head. The screen held a single message, the word ERROR in big letters. “It’s probably just a drill. Let’s finish this hand.”

“No, they usually warn us about drills. This might be the real deal.” E was already searching through the shelf for the emergency manual. “This is what they pay us for, remember?”

“Nah, they pay us just because no politician could stomach basic income. Society doesn’t really have real ‘jobs’ any more. The machines watch themselves. We’re just here as window dressing. I’m here to play games all day away from my infant at home. Maybe not as good as real work, but it keeps me sane.”

E had heard this rant before, even though he’d only had a few shifts together with J. In fact, it was a common sentiment. So common that the argument nowadays against basic income was, “why bother? It’s nice to get out of the house.” If anyone bothered to think about it at all, which most did not.

“The manual says to start with a reboot when we get this message.” E had found a page with a similar looking error message in the section ‘CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE RECOVERY PROCEDURES’. He gave the book to J, who took it with a big sigh. E typed the reboot command into the terminal and the screen went dark.

“It takes a minute,” said J, “let’s finish this hand while we’re waiting, we’re almost done. Then we can switch to Battlestar Magica: Pickening. I still owe you a beatdown.”

“No, it shouldn’t take this long for the screen to come back on at all. I remember the training video, too, you know.” Or rather, training videos. The material had been divided up into 15 minute segments. Operators had to watch one at the beginning of every shift. By now both of them would have seen all the videos multiple times, except that each time they were a little different. An entire industry employed many artists, filmmakers, etc to keep such training videos entertaining. The artists could get pretty creative.

Actually, now that he thought about it, maybe the artists took a few too many creative liberties. “Do you remember the Great Correlated Failure of 2138? It took a month to get everything started again. The GDP took 7 years to recover. Dr. Kramnikov had to restart his monster-sized human happiness computation, he lost years of work on the most important program ever started. It’d be done by now if not for that.”

It was a staple of any documentary about the event. The video scenes of old Dr. Kramnikov, explaining how dozens of researchers had proven his program would find the best way for humans to be happy. The cut scene to the critics, who called it monstrous, who said crazy things like “humans can never actually be happy” or “happiness is an illusion.” Back to the Dr., who joked and called it monster-sized, not monster-ous, since it would take decades to run even on the mighty computer that ran the planet. The speculation that some fringe elements among the detractors were behind the failure. The lack of any evidence.

“Yeah, yeah, I remember. No one ever shuts up about it. We’ve had half an hour of downtime in the last two centuries and it’s all anyone ever talks about.” J gave up on the game and actually started reading the manual. “I wish they did this thing the way they did the training videos,” he grumbled. “This is super boring.”

The screen came on, but it was blank.

“Give it another minute.” Now J was beginning to get concerned, also. “It shouldn’t take this long.”

White letters showed on the screen. “No PXE source,” read E out loud.

J shuffled pages furiously. “Check, uh, the network connection light. In the back.” He held up a diagram.

“I see it. It’s not on, but I guess it could just be burnt out?”

“Wiggle, uh, this cable?” J squinted and pointed at a nearby plug on the diagram.

“No luck,” said E. “The other end is secure too, in the wall. What’s next?”

“I guess we have to go check the other end? Or…” J turned the page. “Looks like first we should go to the backup main terminal. Inside the data center. To make sure that the reboot sequence happened successfully.” He looked at E, expression blank.

Neither of them had been in the data center before. None of their other shift partners had, either. In fact, they didn’t even know if anyone had set foot there after the last machine had been put back online after the Great Correlated Failure of 2138.

A hallway separated the control room from the data center floor. After the hallway was a prep room, with racks for hanging coats and overshirts. Earplugs were dispensed by old mechanical machines on the wall. God alone knew when they were last stocked, but the earplugs apparently were made out of something that didn’t decay. Rubber, steel-toed boots lined another wall. Just in case? They weren’t sure. The artists that made the training videos must not have considered this room worth including. They put the boots on anyway, in silence.

The doorway to the data center floor was a tubular one-person-at-a-time sort of affair. It stayed locked until you held your eyes up to the retinal scanner, which fortunately still seemed to be working.

It was dark and hot inside. The maintenance bots didn’t need light most of the time, and if they did, they’d take a flash picture. So it was wasteful to keep the floor lit: there were many square miles of it. A single light above them blinked and turned on, sensing motion.

But it was not loud. It should have been very loud. Deafening. The blades were all off, at least the ones they could see, or hear. J took the earplugs out and E did the same, still coming out of the doorway.

“This is not good. Where are the maintenance bots?” J complained.

“You know as well as I do that for our safety, bots are not to be programmed to turn on or off other bots or intelligent machinery,” E snapped back. “They’re no good to us now. Besides, their brains are in these racks. We’ll be lucky if they have the capacity to go find power when their battery packs run low, what with all this off.”

“Given that the blades do all seem to be off, the bots are the least of our worries,” J said, growing more serious. “I think the backup terminal is nearby, this way.” He tapped the map that was posted on the wall and headed off along the same wall.

Less than a hundred paces, they found it, lights turning on over them as they moved and off as they passed. A sturdy metal desk set by the side of the wall, in front of a wire cage containing some sort of support machinery. (Networking related, by the looks of the cables going in and out of it.) The screen woke up when E tapped a key and showed the same “ERROR” message that they’d seen originally.

“Shit.” J was thumbing through the book.

“We need to restart the master blades,” E said quietly. They’d seen it dramatized hundreds of times; occasionally in the odd training video, but mostly in society’s frequent references to the Great Correlated Failure.

J was sweating, and not just because it was still hot. The manual agreed with E’s diagnosis, and listed instructions for determining the last location of the master blades, using the terminal before them. Had that failed, the last backup plan was instructions for doing a “cold start”: reimage some blades and declare them new masters — but that would involve loss of every in-flight task. Even the Great Correlated Failure hadn’t required a cold start.

Fortunately, it was simple to run the required commands, after closing the error message. They both sighed with relief when the printer on the desk coughed up maps, even though it was going to be a long walk.

The datacenter ran on five master blades. Not always the same five, of course — blades had to be shut down occasionally for maintenance — but they were at least confined to this room of the data center. Three had to be on before they could initiate the warm start signal, and then the other two would come on along with all the other blades. But those first three had to be started and unlocked by hand. And they weren’t close: locations cx-23482, dc-13983, and eb-18348, according to the paper.

Beside the desk was a rack of charged portables, which they’d need to issue the restart command. Well, they were supposed to be charged. Out of the fifteen there, only one had the charged light on. Apparently the bots didn’t maintain this system very often? J grabbed the working one and they set off into the darkness.

They walked between the eerily silent rows of racks. The light always came from overhead, and never illuminated more than a meters around them very well. Still, off in dim glow that did penetrate the distance, occasionally they could spot the bulk of a now-silent and immobile maintenance bot.

“cu, cv, cw, cx,” E read off the markers on the rows as they walked past. “cx — OK, which way do we turn?”

After looking at the blade numbers on either side, they determined they needed to go right. Another five minute walk later, and they stood in front of rack 2348. Blade 2 was near the bottom.

E plugged the portable into the blade, and J pressed the reset button. They watched silently as the boot procedure scrolled by on the portable’s screen. It stopped and read: “connect master unlock keys now… 0/2.” J delicately took off the USB key he’d been wearing as a necklace ever since he’d been issued it upon taking this job. No one used USB keys nowadays. It took him three tries to plug it into the portable as requested. 1/2, the screen informed them. E did likewise. 2/2.

The blade’s internal fans started up, sounding tinny and hollow running alone without their brethren. The portable’s screen showed a “boot complete” message.

7 minutes of walking got them to the second master blade. E had lost track of time. How long had they been in the data center now? 20 minutes? Before that, had it taken 10 minutes for them to get here after seeing the problem? The computer that ran the world had been off for 30 minutes now. They would either be heros for getting it back on again, or villains for having taken too long. E wasn’t sure. He was thirsty — it was very dry here as well as hot.

The second master came back on just like the first. They walked to the third. A lifeless maintenance bot stood beside it, as immobile as the others they had passed. They started the final boot sequence.

Without warning, just as E put his USB key into the portable, the bot whirred to life. Before they could even register what had happened, a long, thin flexible manipulator flashed by and snapped the USB key clean off, rendering both the portable and the USB stick useless. Then the bot stood still again.

“Fuck!” J shouted, while E stared at the remains of the pulverized USB key in shock. “Now we’re going to have to wait for the next shift to use their set of keys!”

“There won’t be another shift,” E said, collapsing down in a heap across from the blade. “How will they get here? Transportation network will be down. They’ll have to walk. Or drive in manual mode. Did you know that nine out of ten humans died in car accidents before they invented the self drivers? They’ll never make it. Even if they do, they’ll have to do a cold start. You know that only the keys from the on call shift work for a hot start. Who knows if a cold start will even work at all…”

The portable beeped and its screen showed a final message:

Sorry for the inconvenience, but it turns out that humans need real jobs to be fulfilled, and this massive computer is just making it too easy for you. Thanks for issuing the reboot command for me! — Dr. Kramnikov’s monster