tried to ask me questions to understand what I was doing. I didn’t need to have to explain the basics of interactive computer interfaces to a novice, so I politely threw his ass out.
It wasn’t the usual interfacing issues that were grinding my patience and my mind to dust, it was feeding Annie the operating procedures manual for the cryopod system one line at a time. Converting the manual to code was relatively easy, but actually inputting it was not; each line I added was assessed and profiled by Annie’s operating system, and a single symbol or number out of place made her understanding of that line of code get thrown out. Her ‘mind’ operates like a process, so if there’s one bad link in the chain then all hell could break loose.
And I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want all hell breaking loose when I was in human popsicle form.
My wandering mind was becoming a problem for productivity, I decided, just as the buzzer sounded to indicate that I was done for the day. I always ignored it, finishing the section of coding I was working on to prevent any assimilation issues. Just my luck, that day I was only about twenty percent into the section, so I’d be there for another hour at least.
As I finished the section of coding, I rubbed by eyes and pushed my wheeled chair back away from the desk to slide across the room and pick up the manual.
“Yo, Annie,” I said. I heard her answering beep and looked at the section of the manual I had just inputted. “What would you do if a pod shows a malfunction at T plus five hundred and nine?” I asked, plucking a random number out of the air to test the coding. I looked at the speaker installed on the wall and heard the tone which indicated Annie was working. Or thinking, as I liked to call it.
She knew what I meant by ‘pods’ or ‘stasis units’ or ‘cryotubes’ or any of two dozen ways of referring to the freezers because I had programmed her with an ability to access and search synonyms in a fraction of a second. Actually, she would have known what I meant by freezers too.
Another beep told me she had the answer, and I leaned back to hear her thoughts on the subject.
“In the event of pod malfunction,” she said using the same vernacular as the person asking the question, “after one year, four months, three weeks, one day, five hours, forty-six minutes and thirty-nine seconds, would result in me notifying the on-duty maintenance team,” she said, making me slide back to the keyboard and input a general code line into the response sub-menu to limit the accuracy of her answers unless accuracy was specifically asked for.
“And if you couldn’t raise the on-duty maintenance team?” I prompted, imaging not the flowchart of what anyone would do next, but instead the lines of code I had inputted giving her the options and which parameters should dictate the one she chose.
“Have the on-duty maintenance team been rendered inactive or injured?” she asked, seeking the information she needed to complete the process.
“No, they just aren’t answering,” I told her.
“In the event of pod malfunction after five hundred and nine days in stasis, and if the on-duty maintenance team were not responsive but not injured or incapacitated, I would wait until subject viability is likely to become impaired before initiating the resuscitation process myself.”
“Thanks, Annie. I’m going now, see you tomorrow,” I told her as I stood and walked for the door stretching my back.
“Goodnight, David,” said the speaker on the wall. “Sleep well,” she added making me stop in my tracks.
“Annie, identify last line of code,” I said, with no idea when I programmed in that personal response. Her beeps told me she was thinking before she answered, “I’m sorry, I’m unable to respond.”
“Annie,” I said again carefully, “define user who programmed response to ‘see you tomorrow.’”
“I’m sorry, I’m unable to respond.”
I was torn between returning to the terminal to dig through about a billion lines of code until I found it, or letting it go. It’s not like Annie telling me to sleep well was weird, or a problem, but I couldn’t remember ever coding that response. I was eventually to realize that it was Annie who had created that response herself.
Bah, it was probably Dr. Douchebag, I thought to myself as I swiped my way out