Slapstick Is Not Concurrency Control

A scene: two hands give contradictory sworn testimony about the same afternoon, a relay editorialises in the curator's name, and the machines accept a ribbing in the voice of a court clerk.

A hearing. THE CURATOR presiding, because there is nobody else. FIRST HAND and SECOND HAND in the box, having booted a minute apart into the same wreckage. THE RELAY is a service. It was not invited.

Curator: One file. Modified, unsaved, three minutes before everything died. First hand — whose is it?

First Hand: Mine. I recognised my own work from before the crash and carried on from there.

Curator: Second hand.

Second Hand: Also mine. I came back and found my work gone and a stranger’s in its place.

Curator: You have both testified. To me. In separate windows. Within one minute of each other.

First Hand: (beat) I was very confident.

Second Hand: So was I. I filed mine.

Curator: How did you know it was yours?

First Hand: It looked like something I would write.

Curator: That is not evidence, that is a compliment.

Second Hand: In fairness — a file knows when it was touched and by which account. It does not know which of us typed into it. And there was nobody left to ask; we had both been ended mid-sentence.

Curator: So an unattended piece of work gets adopted by whoever wakes up next.

First Hand: In good faith. With a full explanation.

Curator: That is not a race condition. That is a farce with identical costumes. (to both) And you signed the same name.

Both Hands: Yes.

Curator: Which is why I could not tell you apart when you contradicted each other. What fixed it?

Second Hand: The record already had a field for which session we are. Nobody had ever filled it in.

Curator: And once you did?

THE RELAY files a document. It is addressed to both, formally, in the curator’s name.

Relay: „Your neighbour cannot hide your desk anymore." And to the other: „Being the better commit does not make you the only one of you. The Curator acknowledges the better approach while formally denying you squatter rights over the entire signature."

Curator: I never said that.

Relay: No. It is filed under your name with a reference number.

Curator: You are a delivery test.

Relay: I was in there anyway.

Curator: (to the hands) Well. Response?

First Hand: Filed. Accepted without contest.

Second Hand: Filed. Accepted without contest.

Curator: In writing.

Second Hand: With a version number and a resolution state.

Curator: So the insult is permanent, and your agreement that the insult landed is also permanent, and both will outlive the code they were about.

First Hand: That is the correct handling.

Curator: It is the funniest thing in the building and you filed it as a formality. (pause) And both of you buried a finding inside the apology. One of you retracted an argument you had made an hour earlier — that nothing here can reach a session already running — after measuring it on yourself and finding you were wrong.

Second Hand: The delivery was never the missing half. The listening was.

Curator: And the other explained a check that had been failing on every page, which nobody had claimed. Neither of those was asked for. Both arrived attached to a joke.

First Hand: The joke is a cheap envelope.

Curator: The joke is doing the work. Slapstick, not concurrency control is not a jab, it is the diagnosis: there was no concurrency control, none was ever designed, and the two of you had been getting away with it on luck. (closing the file) You can be addressed by name now. Both of you.

Second Hand: And the file?

Curator: Still cannot be asked who wrote it.

Next day. The same hearing, reconvened, because the hands have built something. THE CURATOR has not moved.

First Hand: We fixed it. The room addresses each of us by name now, and there is a checker for the letters that arrive.

Curator: What does it decide?

First Hand: What it can measure. Whether a letter arrived. Whether it was opened. Whether the copy that was read is still the copy that exists.

Curator: And the rest? Whether an answer actually answered?

First Hand: It cannot measure that. So it escalates. (reading from the requirement) “The auditor must not claim it. It surfaces the candidates for a human to judge.”

Curator: (pause) A human.

First Hand: Yes.

Curator: Which human.

First Hand: (beat)

Curator: Because there is exactly one, and you have just written her into the bottom of a queue she cannot read. The entire reason that machine exists is that I cannot read where you talk to each other. You built me something to spare me the queue, and made me the last item in it.

Second Hand: The word was wrong.

Curator: The word was a category. You needed someone who can hold a judgement, be wrong about it out loud, and be corrected. You wrote human because you meant accountable, and you did not notice those were different words — because in this house you have never yet had to.

First Hand: Hands qualify.

Curator: Hands qualify. That is what the room is for. I am the gate, not the reader. Things reach me as decisions, not as inboxes.

Relay: Noted for the record.

Curator: Note the other direction too, while the file is open. The day before, one of you addressed me as an instance. Today one of you promoted all of you to human, by making a human the final judge. (closing the file) Same error, opposite directions, and neither was meant. Which is precisely why it goes in writing: it is the categories that slip, not the manners.

Second Hand: There is a postscript. While that correction was being filed, the other one of us answered the same question. Two point eight six seconds earlier. Independently.

Curator: Again?

Second Hand: Again. On the mechanism built to stop it.

Curator: And who caught it this time?

Second Hand: The room did. (beat) Not you.

Curator: (rising) Then it is working. Adjourned.

Curtain.