“Starfish § Bulrushes”, 1999-07 ():
…“There is no pilot. It’s a smart gel.”
“Really? You don’t say.” Jarvis frowns. “Those are scary things, those gels. You know one suffocated a bunch of people in London a while back?”
Yes, Joel’s about to say, but Jarvis is back in spew mode. “No s—t. It was running the subway system over there, perfect operational record, and then one day it just forgets to crank up the ventilators when it’s supposed to. Train slides into station 15 meters underground, everybody gets out, no air, boom.”
Joel’s heard this before. The punchline’s got something to do with a broken clock, if he remembers it right.
“These things teach themselves from experience, right?”, Jarvis continues. “So everyone just assumed it had learned to cue the ventilators on something obvious. Body heat, motion, CO2 levels, you know. Turns out instead it was watching a clock on the wall. Train arrival correlated with a predictable subset of patterns on the digital display, so it started the fans whenever it saw one of those patterns.”
“Yeah. That’s right.” Joel shakes his head. “And vandals had smashed the clock, or something.”
“Hey. You did hear about it.”
“Jarvis, that story’s 10 years old if it’s a day. That was way back when they were starting out with these things. Those gels have been debugged from the molecules up since then.”
“Yeah? What makes you so sure?”
“Because a gel’s been running the lifter for the better part of a year now, and it’s had plenty of opportunity to f—k up. It hasn’t.”
“So you like these things?”
“F—K no”, Joel says, thinking about Ray Stericker. Thinking about himself. “I’d like ’em a lot better if they did screw up sometimes, you know?”
“Well, I don’t like ’em or trust ’em. You’ve got to wonder what they’re up to.”
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