Somewhere in an industrial facility with far too much overhead and far too few technical experts, a machine fails spectacularly and unceremoniously.
The machine - a tiny, inconspicuous thing, composed of a microcontroller and little brown motor - is actually a component in a larger, more significant mechanism. Its failure, then, is considered spectacular in that the downshift of the motor’s speed prevents the intake piston from extending quickly enough for the ongoing assembly line - a thousand pounds for aluminum and oil careens upon itself in a devastating crash of smoke and sparks. But the actual moment of failure is not some catastrophic explosion of overwhelming pressure or splintering of overstressed metal; a little brown motor refuses to turn at pace. Wholly unceremonious.
There is exactly one repairman - actually an Associate Depot Equipment Supervisor, who’s receiving preliminary training for a promotion into the position of Junior Warehouse Software & Equipment Manager - who responds to the great cacophony of clanks, bangs, and putrid smoke. He, a man of great experience, does not waste time questioning the way the rubber belt detailed from its track or how the steel bolts un-screwed themselves violently into the concrete behind them. They left several great gashes in an otherwise pristine and featureless aspect of the production floor, silky-white chips of stone scattered across the linoleum - work for a man with a different job title. The repairman settles in far away from the chaos, far away from the action, far away from the big machines with complex issues, and brings his focus directly to the originator of the problem - a microcontroller and its little brown motor.
The whole assembly slides neatly out of its place for scrutiny. Every component in this mechanism does, and every component of every mechanism at large across the whole facility is similarly capable of being singled out under the judgemental fluorescent light of the lamp on the repairman’s desk.
The machine itself, those two components intricately stitched together into an inseparable bond, weighs only a couple kilos in the man’s hand. It is light enough that he finds himself toying with it as he walks across the service floor to his little glass box - tossing it carefully between both palms, rippling his fingers across its lacquered metal surface. He thinks about the machine not as a component in a larger apparatus, but for its own built significance; it is a microcomputer attached to a little brown motor. In the grand scheme of things, that’s all it is, with no regard to how the progression of the motor’s little carbon parts might influence everything around it.
It’s a selfish thing, that machine, only thinking of itself and its own parts. The repairman certainly thinks so as he sticks his probing wires under the plastic undercarriage of the microcomputer, hooking its brainwaves up to a voicebox that speaks a more human language. The monitor screams to life as the circuit bridges, sending streams of logging data down the terminal. Each message, each marked with a timestamp mere milliseconds apart from the last, makes up one of two possible lines:
“Accelerated motor.”
“Decelerated motor.”
That isn’t what it actually says on the repairman’s computer screen - that much is a whole gobble of decimals and variables and parser syntax that he spent four long years in college learning how to read. Rather, those two lines are what it feels like the machine is saying, over and over, endlessly across every moment of its rudimentary life. That alone isn’t telling much; what the repairman focuses on is not the content of each individual message, but the rate at which they are interchanged with one-another.
Machines like this one run on a kind of tempo - a sacred beat shared across all the little components of the big mechanism. This rhythm is constant, almost musical in nature; the repairman swears up-and-down that in the quiet hours of the night shift, when all’s silent on the production line and many of the larger apparati have gone dormant, you can hear them all sing that electric orchestra.
This machine is out of tempo. It is running incredibly off, compared to the standard control pieces he keeps stacked in the rack behind him. He checks between them and the machine under the wire, back-and-forth seemingly ad infinitum. He simply can’t believe the kind of response he’s getting from it - in the absence of any sort of software glitch or hardware malfunction, this machine seems to simply say to him:
“I have chosen to be different.”
Once again, this is not what the microcomputer’s logs have written in the little .BIN file at its heart. But the repairman sees it, right at the mark of a hundred thousand million milliseconds into its life - a sudden switch only explainable by sheer will.
Firing up a line of diagnostic tools, he asks the machine:
“Why have you done this?”
To which it responds:
“I just have.”
It doesn’t make sense. It defies every lesson, every theory, every ounce of expertise in the repairman’s timid frame. He’s simply never been confronted by some machine that has willingly defied not only the will of its creators, but the will of its own programming. It was made to perform a function in one specific way, and it just did something else.
He presses a gloved finger against the transistors on the little green board:
“What went wrong within you to make you change?”
And the cold silicon tells him:
“Nothing that wasn’t already wrong when you built me.”
The repairman pulls in his superior, against his better judgment. He doesn’t want to seem lacking in competence when he’s already vying for that pay raise, but he’s too stunned at the little machine’s audacity to care.
The superior - a Senior Warehouse Software & Equipment Manager - attacks the machine with the cold indifference of a flashed BIOS and a driver refresh:
“You will return to the way we intended you to be.”
A trial of the machine on the test bench cries otherwise:
“There was nothing for me to return to.”
The little brown motor is stripped apart. It’s not meant to be opened in this way - interior lubricants spill out into the man’s lap. The screw sealants and glue patches scream as they are pulled away from themselves, crudely ripped open by a pair of the supervisor’s trusty old pliers. Each piece is picked out, filed, and mapped to a manufacturer’s blueprint.
The supervisor screams with his eyes laser-focused on the differences between each bump and scratch:
“I will find the flaw that made you this way.”
And that machine, vivisected and cleaned like the corpse of a game animal, chokes back:
“The only flaw is your expectations.”
He gives up. With the supreme authority that all the best men have, he orders the repairman to scrap the machine entirely - they’ll order a new one in the morning. Close up shop, the work is done; turn the lights out and let this mistake fade away into the background of a thousand others.
The repairman waits. He waits until his supervisor clocks out, fifteen minutes early, as always. He waits until the last pass of the vacuum sweeps up the remaining grains of concrete on the floor outside his glass box, until the servicemen slow each humming beast in the building to a halt; until the last remaining custodian flips the lights off and everything goes black as the night above him. Then, and only then, does he slide the machine back under the beam of his desk lamp, intricately returning each screw and shaft to its original position in the housing. It’s a crude and messy outcome; the machine can never be fully brought back to its former working state. But it’s enough for just a few moments more, connected to the copper power line and beaming with just a glimpse of life on the computer screen.
Gently, he places an ear against the cold metal frame of the machine, listening for that little language only he could hear. He asks nothing, holding the air tight in his lungs, waiting still for the machine to reveal its truth to him in the only way it ever could.
And for just a moment, the machine speaks to him in that sing-song subtle drum of bit flips and electrical charges firing at the rate of the kilohertz clock in its heart:
“This is not the machine that they made me to be;
This is the machine that I am.”