February 19th, 2006
Walking off his job, Noel felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He felt oddly happy – despite that he only minutes before had been solely responsible the destruction of his entire civilisation. His life had been spent learning a trade that no one else could or wanted to do. He and two other men of varying ages were responsible for the maintenance of a giant computer over 100 stories high. Referred to as FATGAS – it was a computer built in another era, indeed it was the pinnacle of Earth’s golden age. FATGAS – an humorous acronym which stood for For All Things Great And Small – was a machine built to reduce the burden of work for everyone. It handled all manner of work that used to be done by human beings. Everything that was consumed, food, clean water, electricity – it was all supplied by FATGAS. The unfortunate problem however, was that FATGAS itself could not always fix itself when it broke down. Although it had robots and other machines that could repair itself – on rare occasions it could not trust itself with its own diagnosis since it’s own diagnosis might be corrupted by the breakdown. And for those rare times (rarely even once a week) a human being was brought in to assess the problem and possible solutions.
Noel was an Admini – and as such was awarded certain rights and freedoms that no one else in the world had. He was guaranteed the right to have children if he wanted them. Most people were randomly chosen to have children – a system instituted by simply removing the contraception powder that was supplied into everyone’s food on puberty. Noel had the right to children, had he not suffered a rather painful dose of radiation sterilized him while repairing the nuclear power source that supplied FATGAS with its intelligence matrix that was core to all its complex decision deciding logic. He was also allowed into all the parties of the rich and famous – though he could not partake in the drug/alcohol related activities that went on. Indeed, he found the parties tedious and no longer participated. He was not missed. Noel was always sobering – being sober – to the other party goers and as such felt only isolated while attending.
Being an Admini – short for FATGAS System Administrator and Central Repair Technician – required him to be sober, well-rested and well-fed at all times in case of an emergency with FATGAS. He was, so to speak, always on duty and forever on call.
Even the poor these days were hardly ‘poor’ in any sense of the word. There lives were devoted to leisure as were the rich, but for various and unknown reasons, they were chosen by FATGAS to receive fewer credits that could be spent on items of luxury – special types of food, VR experiences or seratonin-releasing drugs. No one, not even Noel, knew the reasons some were born rich and others were destined to be poor.
His attempts to question FATGAS on this algorithm yielded poor and confusing results. The only thing that Noel could determine, was that the rich seemed to possess and peculiar genetic trait of developing long, soft hair while babies that would cover their entire bodies. Eventually after a few months the hair would fall off – but it was curious that out of the 49,732 people (constantly maintained by FATGAS through births and if necessary, ingested poison) – more than half the rich people possessed this same genetic trait (properly detailed in the medical histories stored in FATGAS – Medi, a subsystem controlled by FATGAS. But of course FATGAS was programmed to choose the finest human specimans to be rich – only the variables to determine a humans worth/potential remained elusive.
While these details plagued his mind, a horrific accident occured while he was not on watch. The two other Adminis – known only as Carl and Maury – had been assisting FATGAS resolve a curious glitch that was accidentally poisoned 17 poor people during Mardi Gras (the weekly parade and celebration). The radiation from the intelligence matrix had spiked for unknown reasons sending both men – aged 22 and 44 – to an early grave. FATGAS immediately arranged for 19 more babies to be born in exactly 9 months (immediately eliminating contraceptive powder, applying aphrodesiacs, increasing the sexual visual stimulifor 19 couples ‘randomly’ throughout the commune). Noel had been called in immediately as well to resolve what Carl and Maury had been working on. Indeed, Noel had not even been aware of the unfortunate fate of his fellow coworkers because of FATGAS’ ability to quickly remove the offending dead fleshy waste littering its intelligence office. Only later did Noel find out what befell his coworkers.
Investigating their last few work projects, Noel was surprised to learn that they had been tampering with FATGAS’ internal workings. They had tried to raise family members from ‘poor’ to ‘rich’ and – only being able to make such changes to FATGAS if another Admini concurred – Noel suspected (though had no proof) that their deaths had been oddly coincidental if not proper justice.
FATGAS however did have problem – it now could rely only on Noel for all its repair duties. And if something were to happen to him… well he was at the moment completely irreplaceable. FATGAS immediately set out to find two workers – preferably of the same age as the two it had lost. A quick search by FATGAS and no results were to be found.
There was a new apprentice named Lawrence that had been chosen from birth – a strange and dubiously intelligent lad who had just begun the specialized computer training. He had been training for his position since birth – mathematics, reading and writing – an archaic form of knowledge transfer that was to be used to absorb the technical manuals that for whatever reason could not be stored in FATGAS in the event FATGAS failed. However, it would be at least 3 more years until Lawrence would be ready – and FATGAS decided that the odds that something might happen to Noel (.003%) was still too high – Lawrence would have undergo a more aggressive training – a hands-on approach with Noel to gain as much as he could in as short of time as possible.
Earlier that day, Noel had used his superior and strength to throw Lawrence off the top of FATGAS data warehouse. The 100 story fall had instantly killed Lawrence if Noel didn’t count the screaming all the way down. Noel was not particularly troubled at killing the boy – his destiny was to indirectly kill many more when he disconnected the power from FATGAS’ intelligence matrix. A sledgehammer – a tool of a less eloquent time – had made short work of everything in that particular vicinity – Noels hair still had lines of caked on sweat of his performance.
No one immediately noticed the change when FATGAS was disconnected. Televisions still worked and would continue to provide 487 days of continuous programming. But people would notice. First repairs would stop being done on the power grid. Eventually sections of cities would be dark. Food would not be harvested – that would be noticed in a week – when all the current food rations ran out. Water would start to turn rusty brown as the filtering system no longer was maintained. People would notice – just not today.
Noel smiled. Today was a good day.
