pilot ━ every angel is terrifying

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Time easily lost its meaning when working. It's always been that way. As if the handshake between her and that blinking cursor incrementing characters into a perfect symphony of code was a pact with forces beyond the human perception. Only that could possibly explain how the passage of time lost its meaning and she could get lost, hours on end, working her eyes past the point of exhaustion and hurt, until the task was completed, the project was over and she'd sit up, dizzy and perplexed by just how quickly her whole life turned into a binary sequence, how instantaneous was the transition of reality to code and probability.

Of course, that daze would pass after a much needed sleep, which just then, at what her very far stretched guess hoped to be around seven in the evening, was just a faraway thought. Mia Wilkins would be the last to leave the simulation room if the project wasn't completed that night. In fact, she'd go as far as to acknowledge she'll most likely be the last to leave the whole building if her and her team come that close to missing a deadline entirely.

The upgrade package on the MC500 had to be introduced tomorrow in the afternoon, hospitals counted on it.

"Again?" Donald inquired from somewhere behind, making Mia flinch and turn around with a look that tried to claim on her behalf that she believed this existence outside of her thoughts to be nothing but a sudden nuisance. Remembering where she was certainly counted for at very least a medium degree of annoyance added to her pending deaf headache.

Right, she looked back ahead, re-acknowledging her surroundings without tje tunnel vision focus on the numbers right in front of her, written in blocks between the lines of a holographic simulation of the interface seen by an MC500 android. Given the red tint of everything in that small circular area in which the pixels pulsed, their twenty-seventh simulation of the scenario in which an MC500 would be tasked to give first aid to a human failed and the android proved once again to be taken off guard by the changing variables in the algorithm brought by the crisis.

They — and by 'they', Mia finally acknowledged all the people on her team, sat down on their chairs behind, staring at screens showing different parts of the program access in real time by the android — have watched this play out time and time again, each result getting close, but never close enough to the 'fast and efficient response' promised in the advertisement for the android.

"Maybe our database needs a revisit?" She heard Felicia offer reluctantly a direction of research everyone knew all too well could involve even more overtime for all of them. Thus, as expected, a few groans of frustration filled the room.

Mia sighed. The solution was in there, somewhere between the lines of code. Something in there was stopping the otherwise flawless program from accessing efficiently the comprehensive and complete database of every single affliction and procedure that a proper doctor could ever know in current times. She rolled her shoulders back and straightened her posture, stealing a glimpse down at her tablet before finally deciding, "Let's run the simulation back from the top. Re-initialize the human variables and..." Her words held themselves on a rope of hesitation. She sunk her teeth briefly into the flesh of her own tongue and turned around to squint her eyes in the vague direction of Donald, in charge of the simulation runs. "Do me a favour and compile into the program the code I sent in yesterday."

"It hasn't been approved yet," Donald responded instantly, a tired sense of empathy reverberating through his hoarse voice.

"I authorise it," a much warmer voice quipped in from further back where the faded memory of an exit to that simulation room reappeared in Mia's mind. The lights were turned down low in order to facilitate the holographic show, but after a bit of squinting, she made out the silhouette of Elijah and mustered a smile she hope would look closer to showing gratitude than just how bothered she was by the human weakness of sleepiness beginning to take root in her. For Donald, it was sufficient to hear Mr. Kamski's approval in order to compile Mia's code into the program.

SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️Where stories live. Discover now