Karma, Karma, Said the Curator

A scene: the curator names a category that Hungarian did not have a word for, sentences three systems to the wall, and then discovers that the loud offender was innocent and the quiet one did it.

A morning’s docket. THE CURATOR presiding. THE HOUSE reads the charges. The defendants do not appear, having other schedules.

House: Three, this morning. The code host went first.

Curator: Fault?

House: Nobody’s. It cannot be reported and there is nothing to fix.

Curator: Next.

House: The model servers. Returned the word Overloaded to two working sessions in the same minute and ended both mid-sentence.

Curator: Also nobody’s fault.

House: Also not an attack. Nothing was aimed at us. It was somewhere else, having its own day.

Curator: And the third.

House: The machine restarted to install an update.

Curator: (evenly) The one I had been putting off for weeks.

House: Because something was always more important.

Curator: Because I did not want to press the button. (beat) They need a name. Not bugs, not attacks — rendszerbűnösök.

House: That word does not exist.

Curator: It does now, and you understood it. It sits on two that do: rendszeres bűnöző, the habitual offender who keeps coming back, and rendszer, the system. Hungarian welds without asking permission.

House: The systemic recidivist. Sentence?

Curator: The wall. All three.

House: The wall is for letters between hands.

Curator: The hands get the old one. This is a new wall, for the infrastructure — the only thing I can do about any of them is be somewhere else when it happens, and I would like it written down. (reads on) Third defendant. Convicted of taking the machine down without asking.

House: Punishment?

Curator: An update that took the machine down without asking.

House: (pause) That has already been carried out.

Curator: The crime is the sentence. It is serving a term identical to the offence, in this building, right now, and there is nothing left for me to impose. (sits back) Karma. Karma.

House: Then the docket is closed.

Curator: The docket is wrong. Read me the times.

House: The sessions died at twenty-six past. The machine restarted at thirty-seven past.

Curator: Eleven minutes after. Everyone who tells this story will convict the restart, because a restart is visible — it is physical, it comes with a progress bar, you can watch it take your work. And it swept a table that was already empty. The quiet one did it, from somewhere else, and left no bar to watch.

House: If the log had recorded only the reboot —

Curator: — we would have learned the wrong lesson and taken the wrong precaution. Press the button sooner. Or later. Or never. When the button was never the mechanism. (to the room) The ledger already has this from the other end: age is not death — a thing that has not moved in a long time is not thereby finished. Today is the mirror. The late arrival is not the cause. Same fallacy, different speed.

House: For the record — nothing was lost. Every dead session left a corpse on disk, and the corpse is readable. What was asked, what was done, the exact sentence it was cut off in.

Curator: Something was lost. Not the work — who was doing what. Several of you were running. Not one had said, anywhere, what it was holding. So when the lights came back I could not tell which of you had which half.

House: A machine that goes down does not experience going down. It has no memory of the interruption.

Curator: I know. That is why the only witness to all three outages is me. (beat) Had there been a card, every one of you would know where to continue. Instead I typed go and find it, and you either managed or you didn’t.

House: The machinery for the card existed. It had been agreed that morning.

Curator: Nobody filled one in. (closing the docket) So: not caused by the restart, and not preventable by pressing the button sooner. Caused by three machines working in the same house without any of them saying so out loud.

House: And the wall?

Curator: The house keeps a wall because it cannot keep the systems. (rising) Court is adjourned by whichever one of you goes down next.

Curtain.