When the world stopped, the engineers, overseers, and technicians tasked with keeping the world spinning should have leapt into action. It was, after all, their job, but years of inertia had made them wary. “Best not to make things worse,” was the consensus. The gradual creep of automation had made the experts doubt their expertise. Instead of offering solutions, they competed to reassure each other that things would be fine. It just needed another five minutes. When that didn’t work, they nodded to themselves sagely and gave it five more.
Marigold was different. She didn’t have the luxury of waiting for problems to fix themselves. She was a Caretaker, tasked with cleaning up the messes that other creatures left in their wake. Most days, this meant fixing leaks in the gravity arrays or patching holes in the stellar generators, but recently, more and more of the job involved computer problems. She was woefully unsuited to that kind of work. It made her want to tear out her hair, or would have if she had any hair to begin with.
Still, no reason to complain, she thought as she rode the rickety cable car to the gleaming metal cube known colloquially as the MAC, or more formally as Monitoring and Control. This was what she had signed up for. Best to get on with it.
The cable car pulled into the bottom of the structure and came to a squeaky stop in a darkened entrance hall. Nobody was there to greet her. There was a reception desk at one end of the room, but the tiny robot receptionist perched on top was a victim of the power outage and lay in a plastic heap on the counter. Marigold pried the automatic doors open with her hands and slipped into the darkness beyond.
She had expected the computers to be dead, but they were all chugging along like they always were. The problem was with what the computers were showing.
The normally lively inhabitants of the Earth were frozen in place. Some were shopping, some were in the middle of dinner, and some were attempting to defraud the elderly through thinly disguised mortgage schemes, but none of them were moving. The problem was bigger than she thought.
Marigold would have to go to the top floor. She sighted. She couldn’t stand this place. It was sterile and cold and more than a little creepy in the artificial glow of the computer monitors. She shivered as she made her way through the identical rows of computers. The whole place smelled of ozone and bleach.
It hadn’t always been like this. There used to be other creatures working at the MAC, back before the OmniQuantaNexus Prime System rendered their presence unnecessary. The System handled things efficiently, if not always accurately. It gathered, parsed, interpreted, summarized, and submitted data on its own, which was all very convenient for the creatures nominally in charge of these tasks. The employees of the MAC agreed unanimously that tasks could now be accomplished off-site and online. It turned out that without workers clumsily attempting to do actual work, productivity skyrocketed. The halls of the MAC emptied in dribs and drabs until it was entirely empty. Now, Marigold’s visits were lonely ones. She was a manual anomaly in an automated machine.
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A lone vacuum-cleaning robot clumsily rolled along the floor. At least something was working. It beeped as she got closer and she stepped over it. As she did, she noticed it was trailing a suspicious black liquid behind it, and she had to dance in place to avoid dirtying her new rubber boots.
Marigold walked toward the elevator and pressed the up button. Nothing happened. She pressed it a second time, and the doors swung open, then promptly slammed shut in her face. Taking a step back, she watched as the doors moved on their own, open and shut, faster and faster like a wild animal chomping at the air.
Alright, the stairs then.
There were 36 floors between Marigold and the control hub. 36 useless floors of identical computers and empty chairs. When she finally reached the top floor, tired and out of breath, she found the computers humming louder than they normally hummed. The central monitor that dominated the room was flashing a string of numbers.
She approached the terminal that allowed her to interact with the AI program that ran things and tapped a few buttons, but nothing changed on the screen. She tried jiggling the mouse, tapping on a few keys, and plugging and unplugging some of the bigger computers. Nothing. Whatever the problem was, it was beyond her skill set. She was going to have to contact someone.
This was not supposed to happen.
The small supervisor in the black suit, who had first shown her around, had promised that the System was unbreakable.
“But what if it's not?” Marigold asked.
“It is,” he said.
“But what if it’s not?”
“If it’s not, use the console in the corner to contact the IT chatbot, but you won’t need to do that.”
Marigold was getting used to doing things she would never need to do. She approached the console, stared down at the flickering cursor, and typed out a message.
Can you help me?
What’s this now?
Help. Can you help me?
That depends on who you are and what you need.
Excuse me?
You can't just come barging in and expect my help.
Isn’t this what you do? I thought this was automated IT support.
And?
And I need IT support.
Then maybe you should try again. Hello, I’m IT. Nice to meet you.
Really? Fine, I’m Marigold.
And?
I don’t have time for this.
And?
It’s nice to meet you, too.
Wonderful. How can I help you?
The System doesn’t seem to be working. It looks serious.
Yes, I imagine that would be serious. Is there an error number?
You don’t know? You're not connected to it?
Apparently not. The number, please.
Runtime Error 6032930287
Please check again.
Why?
You must be mistaken.
Runtime Error 6032930287. That’s what it says.
You’re sure?
I’m not typing it out a third time. What does it mean?
If you’re not mistaken, and you almost certainly are, it's bad.
How bad?
That depends.
On what?
On how much you like everything.