Prologue

Gurgling, hissing, and spitting noises came from the industrial coffee machine that had been set up in a small nook in the hallway of the Intergalactic Administrative Office just outside of sector fourteen thirty-two B. Grabbing the carafe by the plastic handle, Algrim poured the steaming brown liquid into a mug with the words "I'll try to be nicer, if you try to be smarter" printed on the side. Adding two packets of sugar and a small amount of creamer, Algrim walked back to his desk and groaned as he sat down. Turning his chair back to the monitors on the desk of his cubicle, he inhaled deeply as he smelled the aroma wafting from the brown liquid gold in his mug.

"Ahhhhh. Coffee." Algrim said, sighing heavily and closing his eyes as the smell took him to a happier place.

The beans for this miracle drink could only be found on one of the newest additions to the Federation's integrated planets, Planet 35956390246, also known as Earth. They had been cultivated from a small shrub found in tropical environments and were so unassuming it was a miracle they found them to use for this purpose. First, they were planted and grown to maturity, then they harvested the cherries, removed the beans, dried them, milled them, then sorted them into graded batches and shipped them around the world to be used to make coffee by brewing them with boiling water after they were ground into a coarse powder.

Taking a sip of the hot beverage, Algrim jumped slightly as the liquid burned his mouth. He sat the coffee on his desk to cool and pulled up the program he had been working on.

"How's that AI assistant coming along, Algrim?" A voice behind him asked.

"I just finished the final version of the large language model and am uploading it to the system now. Shouldn't be long until we can send out a patch with the assistant to help the inhabitants." Algrim said turning in his chair to see Filbert, his boss, leaning on the top of one of the cubicle walls.

"Excellent news! We need to hurry and get that to them, so they have the additional help. Those poor creatures have not adapted well to the System integration." Filbert replied.

"I'm still slightly worried about the load it's going to put on the mana servers to add such a large object to the System for them. The calls it makes to get the necessary information to help them can be quite taxing on the memory." Algrim said.

"Did you make sure to run integration tests on the gateway to be sure the API calls are going through ok?" Filbert asked taking a drink of his own coffee.

"I did. We have ninety-five percent test coverage, and all the tests pass fine. But we haven't had a chance to do any load testing on a sandbox server." Algrim replied, trying to give a reason to stall for more time before integrating the AI.

"Unfortunately, the head office wants that out ASAP. We don't have any more testing time. It's gonna have to go to prod as is. As soon as you finish the upload, stage it, and ship it." Filbert answered, turning down his concerns in favor of progress. "Let me know as soon as it's ready to go out and we'll monitor the release."

With that, Filbert slapped a hand on the cubicle wall and walked away before Algrim could raise another issue.

"Don't say I didn't warn you. I'm on vacation starting tomorrow, so I won't be here to clean up your mess." Algrim whispered to himself as he returned to the monitor to finalize the package.

Algrim had been working for the Intergalactic Federation of Planets for about ten years now and it was always the same. The product team came up with new ideas and shoved them down the development team's throats with impossible deadlines under the guise of "making the clients happy". He just wished they took the time to see all the effort that went into making a product this complex work with all the possible edge cases that the inhabitants created through odd use cases.

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Once, a creature on the planet named Ur used his System interface to save screenshots of his victims on the servers, and one of them froze before it could be transported. That poor bastard was killed moments later by a vicious Trigord that he couldn't see coming because the image was stuck covering his entire field of vision. The screenshots feature had been removed after that.

An AI assistant was a far more complicated addition than screenshots and his worry over it causing the servers to freeze or worse, shut down, was a very real possibility. He had been working on the Multipurpose Artificial Realtime Intelligent Assistant, or MARIA for short, for months now and while he was confident it would help the inhabitants, he was not comfortable releasing it yet. As his boss pointed out though, it wasn't his job to make the decisions, just to write the code.

With the final adjustments made, and multiple approvals from his co-workers who likely hadn't even read through his code to find issues, he completed the pull request and merged his changes into the main branch of code to be staged for release. Ten minutes later, the merge showed complete, the pipelines had no failures, and so Algrim sent an email to his boss informing him the code was ready to deploy. He received a reply almost immediately with a message that only contained an emoji of a hand giving a thumbs up.

"Typical. I wonder if I could clock out and make it to my shuttle before it goes to production ?" Algrim thought to himself as he leaned back in his chair.

"How's MARIA looking? I just saw you completed that pull request." Rathar said peering over the cubicle wall next to him.

Rathar had been his cubicle neighbor since he joined the development team a little over five years ago. They took lunch breaks together and had similar hobbies, so, Algrim had become close friends with him early on.

"Oh, it's fine. It's not the AI I'm worried about. It's the System's ability to handle the extra load I'm concerned with." Algrim replied looking at where Rathar was peeking his head over.

"So, you think it's going to be a problem?" Rathar asked.

"We'll just have to wait and see. I hope not because it will help those poor creatures, but we couldn't put the same load on the sandbox that production has, so it'll have to be a trial by fire." Algrim replied, still concerned, but feeling as though the years of this happening had worn him down to almost unconcerned disinterest.

"Can you help me take a look at this new algorithm for the Gamma quadrant? It's been giving me trouble with the returned results." Rathar asked him with a pleading tone in his voice.

"Sure thing. But after that, I'm off the clock for the next two weeks. I'm in for some game time on the newest Galaxy Masters game that just came out." Algrim replied with a smile on his face as he stood up to move around Rathar's cubicle.

Talking through what Rathar was seeing, they made some small changes over the next hour before Algrim finally stood up and stretched.

"Well, it's been an hour. Nothing is on fire yet, so hopefully the new AI is fine." Algrim said as he walked back to his desk.

When he arrived, there was a message for him blinking in his toolbar. Opening it, he read the message and his eyes went wide.

"Shit! I gotta make a call. So much for my vacation time."