The Error Bell

[tomash3]

A story of those who try to make sure everyone makes it up to the System and some of the troubles they face.

CW: death, medical malpractice

Cyan-Less-2-Green — 2373

The error bell tolled again.

It hung in the belfries of simulated cathedrals. It hovered impossibly in midair above some few bars. It sat, impossibly shrunk, on desks.

In its myriad homes, the error bell rang mournfully.

Someone who had started to upload didn't make it.

Someone who had had a chance.

Some of those who failed to upload had been doomed to die before they made their appointment. No process changes, no inspection, could have saved them. The cure for that fate lay in long years of climate remediation, of engineering, of medical research, of late nights and increased funding.

Evan Nguyen was not, per the initial burst of data, so unfortunate. He should have been receiving his tutorial. Yet he was not.

A small contingent of investigators, who’d drawn themselves out of the set of techs who watched the upload failure report feed, gathered around a table, letting the fading echoes of the bell they had rung fade away.

Cyan-Less-2-Green of the RGB clade spoke first. “Springfield again,” he said, glum, as he ran a hand through his nearly-pure-cyan hair.

“Third one in two years that’s like this from them now,” April Is The Cruelest Month, an anthro rat, commented. “Three alignment alarms, three post-correction resumes, and then he went to noise. Like the corrections didn’t take.” Her ears and tail drooped.

“Different unit too.” That was BT-034, who’d done a lot of work on its robot body over the last few decades. “But a lot else seems close. Same room.”

“Ah, excuse me, should we take the pause?” Spider asked, straightening her tie. “Or is this one time-sensitive?”

“Now’s good,” Bob agreed. “Not like they'll be less cagey a thou earlier.”

Cyan mimed pulling a shade down. The displays around the room, in whatever form they took, faded out, and the light went dim. “A thousandth-day of silence for Evan Nguyen, who couldn't join us here today.”

The room stilled.

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.

.

Ding.

The room brightened and came back to life.

“So,” Cyan said, “it’s really starting to feel like there’s a pattern to these.” Links to the bundles of work on two previous incidents from Springfield showed up for everyone else as he added in the references. “But I can’t find it.”

He popped open the older reports himself. “Do we have anything more on these ones?”

“I don't understand why they took so long to send maintenance logs,” BT-034 said.

“Could we try to get a court order, maybe?” Spider suggested.

An icon appeared over Cruelest Month’s head as she turned her hearing off and stared down at the thick tome she often used as an interface.

“We’ve tried,” Bob said. “But the lawyers have decided they won’t push on this one too hard for some reason, and the courts down there aren’t in a huge hurry either, if I’m reading this right.”

“The board’s on a small clinics kick again,” Cyan said, “so, knowing how the phys-side inspectors are, they’re being even more friendly about things than usual.”

“And they’re insisting that they did everything right and that they have no idea what the problem could be and that they're busy and all these other excuses,” Bob said. “So there’s nothing there but people dragging their feet on the inquiry. Typical.”

BT-034 cut in by projecting a graph into the air. “I looked through the small batch of inspection reports from before the last failure that we finally got. These dispersion readings don't look random enough to me.”

The rest of the room looked at the display. “Huh,” Cyan said, “Weird.”

“Wait, are we thinking there’s something wrong with the data we’re getting?” Spider asked.

Cyan shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Should we call them to get initial statements?” Spider asked.

“Can’t hurt,” Bob agreed.

“Probably won’t go anywhere, but it’s worth a shot.” Cyan tapped the table so that the small AVEC stage built into the sim would activate on one end of the room. He checked to make sure everyone was ready and dialed the clinic.

At the last ring, someone picked up. The assembled systechs couldn’t see who they were talking to, since he was very close to the camera, but they did notice what might be a mop handle in the picture.

“Hello,” Cyan said. “Is this Springfield Upload?”

“Sure is,” the person phys-side agreed.

“We’re with an upload reliability working group, and we’re calling about the recent upload failure.”

“Sorry, can’t help you schedule. Amy’s on break and I don’t know how to work the calendar,” the man said.

“We’re calling about the recent upload failure. A Mr. Nguyen in unit 5. We’d like to get people’s impressions while they’re still fresh,” Cyan clarified.

The man on the other end realized he’d misheard. “Wait, upload failure?” he asked. The techs could see him backing up and leaning down so that his face was mostly in view.

“You haven’t heard yet?” Spider asked.

The man shook his head “Nope, no one’s said a thing. I can ask Doc for you but he’s in the office tidying up the paperwork and we’re supposed to leave him alone when he’s in there.”

He paused. “Who’d you say you were calling about again?”

“Evan Nguyen,” Cyan said.

“... Older fellow in pretty good shape besides the bad leg?”

Cyan recalled the personal data. “That matches his paperwork.”

“We chatted a bit before he went up. Gave me his good knife ‘cause none of his kids wanted it. They’re missing out, really. You said … he didn’t make it?”

“Unfortunately,” Cyan said. “We’re trying to figure out what happened.”

“I thought that machine was gonna kill someone one of these days. It beeps way more than the rest of them.”

Cyan let a silence hang in the hopes of getting more information.

“Yeah, number 5’s the fussy one. We had someone in here to fiddle with it last year and again a few months back, but whatever they did didn’t work.”

A cloud of data appeared around BT-034 as it thought of something else to check.

“Huh, interesting,” Cyan said. “No one’s said anything about that —”

“— Dreamer’s fuzzy radar ears!” Cruelest Month shouted, sending portions of the current and previous reports into the middle of the room with added highlighting. She remembered to undeafen herself and continued. “Look at this! The main serial’s different, but these part IDs haven’t changed! That … can’t happen.”

“Someone’s recycling bad parts?” Bob suggested.

Cyan held up a hand for silence. He’d just had an idea about what could be going on here. He didn’t like it, but if it was true … this might be his one chance to check.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Could you do me a favor, uh … didn’t get your name, I’m afraid.”

“Steve. I do the cleaning and the fixing around here, at least when it’s small stuff. You?”

“Cyan-Less-2-Green. Or just Cyan.”

“Oh, like the hair? Bit on the nose, no?”

“It’s a good naming scheme,” Cyan objected. “Makes it a bit easier to tell my cos apart. But anyway, Steve, could you go get the serial number off of unit 5? It’ll be on a plate on the back by the main power cable.”

“Sure thing,” Steve agreed. He came back about a minute later and read out a serial.

“That’s from the first incident,” Spider said.

“The first incident?” Steve asked.

“We’ve seen two cases that looked similar to what happened with Mr. Nguyen — Evan — over the last two years,” Cyan said. “We’ve been trying to figure out why the issue keeps happening, especially since it’s always been on different scanners. Or … we thought it’s been different ones.”

“That laser’s been there as long as I have,” Steve said. “You’re telling me that thing just kills people sometimes? Kills-kills, not upload-kills.”

“Looks like it,” Cyan said. “Thanks for talking to us about this. We've been having … a lot of trouble getting information.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Spider said, “but how long have you been working at this clinic?”

“Six-ish years, why?”

Spider flicked another excerpt into the rapidly-growing heap of suspicious documents that was hovering over the conference table. “Install date’s wrong too, then,” she said. “Probably to dodge the deep clean.”

Dr. Andrew H. Brown, or just Doc, leaned head into reception. “Amy, can you reschedule some of Monday's slots please? We'll be down —” Doc noticed the call, who was on the call, and heard Spider's comment about the dates.

If that was who he thought it was and they'd found something he'd overlooked … there could be trouble. He scrambled over to the desk and jabbed the end call button, shoving past Steve.

Sys-side, the view of the clinic disappeared.

Cruelest Month was the first to say what everyone was thinking. “Well, fuck.”

“At least now we’ve got a lead,” Cyan said. “Penny pinching rat-bastards … sorry.” He looked over at Cruelest Month.

“You’re good,” Cruelest Month said.

“Let’s get more people and more forks on this and see what we’ve found by tomorrow,” Bob suggested.

“Should we put the seals back up for now?” Spider asked. “I don’t think who died matters for this.”

Cyan, who’d been running through his list of people he’d want to pull into this investigation even before Bob suggested it, startled at the question. “Right, good point, thanks Spider. Then I’ll make a feed for this mess.” Glad someone’s paying attention to that.

The meeting dispersed into scurrying sub-groups (in Cruelest Month’s case, literally) of systechs. They didn’t have much difficulty finding evidence that there was something fishy with Springfield Upload’s paperwork (such as they had access to), as finding issues is much easier when one knows there are issues to find.

By the next day, a larger gathering of people with an interest in upload failure investigations, including many of the ex-regulators and ex-lawyers, were gathered in a bigger meeting room. Wizard council’s not what I would’ve gone with, Cyan thought, but it’ll do.

The crowd was there so that everyone could go through what evidence they’d managed to gather before it got packaged up and sent phys-side. They didn’t have hard proof — just inconsistencies in statements and paperwork — but there were plenty of small issues that the Consortium could quickly follow up on.

Over the next two weeks, it became clear the Consortium wasn’t all that concerned by what these systechs had found. Oh, they were investigating, of course, but they were not using any of the tools they had to handle problems quickly. Instead, there were initial inquiries and requests for an explanation and all the other ways to look into the problem without accusing anyone of anything or having to compel their cooperation.

The Consortium lawyers were caught between wanting to do something and the weight of customs, expectations, procedures, and precedents. This wasn’t that bad or that urgent, they reasoned, relative to previous issues, and no one wanted to explain to management why they’d suddenly pulled out every tool at their disposal for this. They didn’t want to have to explain why they’d ignored the issue, either, if this became a bigger deal. So, they rode that tension as best they could, poking around the edges of what the techs had discovered.

This was understandable. Understandable, however, did not mean acceptable, as far as Cyan and his friends and colleagues were concerned, though.

From their perch up the Ansible, they reached for their own ways to tip the scales.

There was nothing they could do, personally or collectively, to make the situation change, but public opinion has a weight to it. Some of those who devoted their immortality to improving the reliability of uploading had cultivated the ability to leverage it.

So, the techs who’d been at that first meeting took some time to summarize all that had happened into a letter of concern. They were concerned about what was going on at Springfield Upload and the lack of action from the Consortium. Something needed to change before someone else got killed.

Before they thrust their worries into circulation, they sent copies to those they were worried about to get their statements. The matter wasn’t so urgent that it required breaching that custom, after all.

The Consortium responded with the expected platitudes about limited investigative resources.

As to the clinic itself, Cyan, for the grave sin of being first on the author list, received the panicked call.

“You can’t publish this!” Dr. Brown insisted. “You’ll ruin me!”

Cyan hadn’t expected to be contacted at what was, for Doc, nearly midnight. He certainly wasn’t happy that the messages left for him had been given extremely high priorities, enough to jolt him awake with adrenaline. “And?” he demanded.

“You don’t get it! We’re getting squeezed by rent, squeezed by the power bill and the costs. We can’t afford to be down for all the inspections and calibrations and rebuilds! So we let things slide and then there was an incident so we had to cover that up!”

“So you decided to knowingly use unsafe equipment and cover it up?” Cyan asked.

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“Well, for one thing, lax inspections and maintenance happen all the time. We’ve got pages of ways to say ‘they half-assed the checks’ without remotely implying blame. You just admit to the problem, promise to do better, and that’s it unless it’s an obvious pattern.” Cyan said. I don’t always like it, but it’s the least bad way to handle those issues. Can't have people afraid of us. “Or maybe you could take a license downgrade? Stop taking higher-risk cases and get longer teardown timelines? You had a lot of options that weren’t fraud.”

“But then we’d look bad and lose customers!”

“And you won’t look bad now that you’ve killed three people and covered it up?” Cyan wished he could give this Doc a firm ping to emphasize his point.

“It was going to be fine!” Doc insisted. “It was just paperwork, and then it was just a one-off issue!”

Cyan glared at the video feed of the doctor.

“I didn’t know it would get this bad!” Doc said, driven to panic by what he thought would happen to him. “Honestly, I didn’t think this would happen!”

“You didn’t think more people would die when you didn’t fix whatever it was that killed someone and just kept that unit in service.” Cyan didn’t need to play up his skeptical expression.

“I… I… accidents happen!”

“Accidents do happen,” Cyan agreed. “But we can prevent a lot of them if we try. That’s why I do all this! I don’t want you to go to prison, I want people to not die because the head’s been drifting for months or someone forgot to flip a switch! Do you think I want to be playing cop from up here of all places?”

The question seemed to throw Doc for a loop. “I… so what do you want?”

“I want people to stop dying. Personally, I want people to do their annual earthquake test — not an issue for you, I know, but I’ve seen too many problems. But as to what I want from you…”

Cyan took a deep breath. I know this is the least bad solution. I’ve talked about it. I’ve seen it happen. It’s the world we live in.

“Tomorrow morning, go announce that you’ve found out about all these safety issues and that you can’t believe you didn’t notice until after someone died. I’m sure you can make it sound good. Work with the board, let them censure you if they think they have to. Maybe take a long vacation, maybe resign. We both know they don’t throw the book at people who look like they’re being forthcoming.”

Cyan could almost see Doc latching onto the idea. “And then you won’t send this letter to everyone?”

“Then we won’t need to,” Cyan said. “That letter’s for getting people to fix the problem. If you fix the problem without us needing to try and draw public attention to it, then we have what we want. Upload reliability, or closer to it, at least.”

“You’re sure I’m not going to go to prison over this?” Doc asked.

“I can’t promise anything. I don’t know how hard it’ll be to pull the ‘I had no idea’ routine, but I’ve seen the Consortium keeping things quiet much more often than not.”

“I thought it was going to be fine,” Doc repeated, tears beginning to form.

“Get some sleep,” Cyan suggested. “We won’t do anything until your tomorrow morning.”

Dr. Brown hung up the call.

Several hours later, Cyan’s group was greeted by the announcement that Springfield Upload had discovered serious irregularities while investigating a misupload and would be shutting down until the Ansible Board could help them investigate.

The letter of concern, nearly finished, sank into archives and exocortices, and those involved gathered for a muted celebration.

They had gotten the best resolution they could hope for under the circumstances, and that was reason enough to a party. To toast all those who would now not die of preventable error this year or the next, and to remember those three who had not made it.

Above the gathered crowd, the error bell tolled once more.

Someone else can take that one, Cyan concluded. I need a break from these.

Comments

[hamratza]

What a lovely read~. I remember when you first brought this up, this idea of malpractice in uploading clinics as a plot device for a short story such as this. It has certainly provided a stellar foundation, and I also have made use of it myself in other venues. It is, of course, a compelling issue that everyone can agree on: Negligent homicide is bad.

I have noticed a pattern in your writing, however, that gives me pause. I notice in many of your stories there are Big Important Proper Nouns around which characters are organized. I am pleased to see my prior concern — that the apparent centralization of such organizations defies the anarchistic ethos of the System — addressed with the dispersion of systechs and other concerned parties across various groups like this. Such communities surely do exist, mind, but I wonder whether they best represent the culture of Lagrange.

Your character designs are vibrant and diverse, exactly as they should be. That means, also, that some of your characters are just named “Bob”, and there is truth and humor in that simplicity as well. But if every character were called “Tom”, “Quinn”, or “Mary”, then we might not so quickly reach for keywords such as diversity and variety, yes?

Perhaps, likewise, we can think about other ways in which people organize around common goals such as education, investigation, and mobilization. Many of the ways in which anarchism functions are so decentralized that to name instances of mutual aid such as this simply does not make sense. One does not, after all, generally offer a neighbor a cup of sugar in the name of the Neighborhood Foodshare Association. Unless they do; that is the beauty of anarchism: We will each find our own way.

And perhaps this is your way, Tomash. And if that is so, then that is so, but I wonder whether, perhaps, there is something that you are seeking to explore that I have overlooked. Does this particular variety of community organization — one that rather resembles a 501(c) — dig into a topic that you have an enduring interest in?

You've got a point

[tomash3]

I was a bit quick to assign the definite article to a group of people working on a problem, and, since the exact organizational structure didn't really matter to the story I wanted to tell, I've edited to better reflect how the people who'd be interested in preventing this sort of thing might arrange themselves.[1]

I'll admit that I didn't consider the structure (or non-structure) of various tech groups too explicitly when I was putting some of the stories about them together. (And I'll note that I'm rather unfamiliar with how anarchies work at scale.)

What I've mainly been interested in exploring was the infrastructure of the System - the folks who're out there quietly doing stuff that's needed to keep the lights on that most people don't need to know exists. It's definitely the case that there's a lot less of that on the System, but ... it's still there. There's a lot to be said about the folks keeping the dream alive.

As to what I've adjusted upload failure investigation folks towards, my sense is that that's a group that acts similarly to an open source project. They've got their sims and feeds and so on, and, while contacting "the upload failure WG" (or "the upload failure people", perhaps) isn't a thing that can be done (for instance, there's probably a contingent of people who lurk the main failures feed at best while being over there cooking up tooling for finding manufacturing issues) ... you can get decently close, sort of like how the circle you'd draw around "the LLVM developers" wouldn't be too fuzzy.

It also feels true that the techs, more than the rest of Lagrange, have to deal with unique shared resources (there's only one connection to Earth, for example) and have some contact with a state, so there might be a tendency towards Important Proper Nouns that makes sense but that I've overgeneralized.

Anyway, this has been a rambling reply to good points I never slowed down to think about, and I appreciate that you took the time to raise them.

[1]: And now I'm turning over ways to adjust my planned bit about sys-side's anti-spam to make it clearer how decentralized that effort is, because my read is that that work doesn't pull folks together as much as accident investigations do