Initially he’d put this down to having stuffed last night’s pizza into his stupid greedy face.
Never a good idea at 5.50am.
He’d also chugged down a can of coke, an espresso and 2, no, 3 paracetamol.
He’d hardly slept.
Burning midnight oil, for a couple of days now. And it showed.
His face was sallow, his eyes were sunken. Skin greying.
The weather files had been fine when he’d taken over the shift. All the columns were in line with protocols.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
The top bods had asked for a late run on the lighting. They had lobbied for a few weeks of extra sun. A lot of them were booking last minute flights to sandy destinations. Getting the decks of their yachts sanded.
Weather was BIG BUSINESS.
With weather you controlled the markets.
With the markets under control, you had the people.
With the people pliant, you steered commerce.
Made the trends.
Guided the searches and hot lists.
You could make Gods weep.
The programmer was no God. The programmer was barely a programmer at all.
Having blagged his way though the paper sift and phone screening, he had started the job just last week. And only paying the slightest bit of attention during online induction.
When he’d run the file logs, as he had been shown by Brian a dozen or times, everything was golden. That is to say, he was i the ‘green’. The systems reported optimal, operating normally.
35% Sun, 25% Cloud, 25% Drizzle and 15% Variable.
But the cycle was stuck.
The run path was off. Even a .352% miscalculation could cripple a state.
He followed the guidebook.
To the letter...
//get exe files included in the directory
var files = Directory.GetFiles("", "*.exe”);
Console.WriteLine(“Number of exe:" + files.Count());
foreach (var file in files)
{
// start each process
Process.Start(file);
}
No DICE. None.
The storm clouds gathered outside at the same time as the onscreen simulator.
Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled.
Rains fell. Market simulations tumbled. Charts flashed red. Negative figures generated negative values. Gold, Oil, Copper, Diamonds. Spiraling.
He gulped. Blinking fast.
With his hands shaking, he went for a ‘force quit’.
The screen remained locked. Brian wasn’t answering calls!
This was a real mess.
The storm cloud, larger than the Duchy itself, built and built...
He read the last page of the book.
The one written in CAPITALS.
“EMERGENCY PROCEDURE!”
‘Locate power switch behind monitor. Hold down for 5 seconds. Release. Wait 15 seconds and flick back on again.’
And so, as the instructions stated, he turned it off, began counting to 15 and hoped to goodness it would boot back up again.
