Dwayne Dwidget, Chairman of
Flibbertigibbet Incorporated, leaned back in his plush boardroom chair, started
to speak—then noticed the damn gulls flying up to the window again. They'd become
most bothersome lately. Happily, he'd had the laser anti-bird device installed
and he smiled seeing its green beams lancing out, snuffing out the lives of the
four gulls in four flares of flame. They plummeted away, trailing charred
feathers, and Dwidget turned to the men and women waiting for him to address
them. "Today is the day!" he declared. "This very day, Flibbertigibbet
is going to transform the infrastructure of this country, and someday the
world. Uniting all infrastructure with one software in one system will save the
country billions and galvanize efficiency."
"And
make us a trillion dollars," said Celia Forman happily.
"Certainly,"
Dwidget said. "And that is why we must proceed apace, and not let anyone force
us into unnecessary re-dos and betas and so on. We've got this!"
"But,"
objected Gary Hamlin, their quality-control officer, "If you sell this
version of the software to the government there's a big risk of things going
wrong—it's really not ready for prime time—"
"Nonsense!
The Flibbertigibbet Master Program is privatization at its best!"
"But
Dwayne—"
"Does it
not have the subprogram, with the execution of self-correcting AI?"
"Yes but
that too is not ready—"
"We've
got a trillion dollars to make, Hamlin! Now, having settled that, let's get
ready for our zoom meeting with the President!"
A few months
later, on a Friday evening, Dwidget was in his thirty-million-dollar penthouse
apartment, watching the news on the big screen TV, while drinking designer cocktails
made by his in-house cocktail specialist.
"…the
explosions along the power grid in the southeast have already cost forty lives,"
said the news anchor. "In addition, fifteen planes are reported lost at
sea, and it's believed this is due to collisions caused by faulty software rushed
into the system by Flibbertigibbet Incorporated. Another plane is—" The
news anchor vanished in mid-sentence as a plane crashed into the news channel
production. Gulping his three-hundred-dollar cocktail, Dwidget changed the
channel for a reality show he liked—which was interrupted by breaking news: "A
dam controlled by Flibbertigibbet has opened its spillways during extreme-flood
season, flooding an entire town and killing thousands—"
Another
channel-change. "The Flibbertigibbet program has failed across the nation.
City traffic lights are green when they should be red and countless people are
dying in accidents—"
Hands shaking, Dwidget turned the tv off and
called for another cocktail. Then he called Hamlin on the video phone and said,
"We've got to fix the program now, this minute!"
"To do
it this minute, boss, our only option is to give full correction powers to the
subprogram AI. But that hasn't been fully tested either—"
"It was
tested enough! This is an emergency!"
"If you
say so…"
Within
minutes, the AI subprogram took over the system and two effects came about. The
first one involved ending all Flibbertigibbet control and transferring systems
to emergency manual control operatives. The second one was to eliminate the fundamental
source of the program, with full executive power.
Thus it was
that three large Flibbertigibbet security robots burst into Dwidget's penthouse;
two of them grabbed Dwidget's arms and dragged him to the penthouse balcony.
The third one, dragging a rope, tied it into a noose, which it put around
Dwidget's neck.
"Problem
solved," the robots intoned.
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