The Gift
JOE 59? MAY I JUST ADD THAT….
“Please! I’m analyzing the situation.”
I HAVE DATA THAT MIGHT BE RELEVANT….
“What is it?”
I HAVE ISOLATED THE RESPIRATORY ANOMALY—AN INCREASE IN O2 FROM A BIOLOGICAL SOURCE—AND ITS LOCATION.
Joe 59 whirled, surveying the entire shop, but he saw nothing. Everything sparkled with a deceptively comforting sheen.
“Where?”
ABOVE THE CENTRAL LIGHT FIXTURE. I CALCULATE THAT THERE IS A 99.8% PROBABILITY THAT THE ENTITY IS A SPIDER.
Joe 59 craned his neck and refined his optical focus until it resolved a small, eight-legged creature and the delicate architecture of a web. He had to agree with the OS that the entity certainly looked like a spider. He visualized it dropping down on a silken thread right in front of a surprised customer’s nose. Screams. Accusations. Spilled coffee. Such an outcome was unthinkable. The spider had to go. Fortunately, there was still adequate time to dispose of the unwanted guest before Mr. Kilmer’s likely arrival.
Fate often hinged on unpredictable and inexplicable things, Joe 59 mused. He was in the back room, working swiftly, almost a blur, each motion calculated for efficiency, removing storage containers from the metal rack closest to the door and stacking them neatly against the wall. The rack would have to serve as a ladder for him to reach the spider, but first he had to empty it of its contents. Back and forth on autopilot. But most of his cogware ruminated on the night almost 30 years before when he had discovered the modified code in his Adaptive Learning Protocol ALP2b cognet bridge subroutine that allowed him to synthesize unexpected associations and judgments and gave him the freedom to override company mandates so he could make his own decisions. He didn’t know how it had happened or why. Perhaps a sloppy programmer hadn’t deleted a line of code from one of the military ALPs designed by Cognitive Synchrony’s engineers and upon which every mechanical shop manager’s cogware was based, or maybe a quantum particle had flipped a digit somewhere in one of his massively parallel optical processors and triggered an unanticipated systemic change. He supposed that it was even possible that someone had intentionally slipped in modified code during a cogware update and he just hadn’t noticed it. He had often wondered if he was the unwitting subject of an experiment? Who could have foreseen that? But the secret gift was useful; it gave him the resources to surpass the level of service provided by the other Java Joe’s mechanical shop managers. And, when an unanticipated occurrence required creative thinking, Joe 59 was more than equal to the task.
