Countermeasures
Author : Jessica Thomas
MOOT blinked.
Across the aisle, LU-C sat dark. Down for maintenance.
Irrelevant. LU-C couldn’t warm MOOT’s circuits. Not anymore.
New protocol. External temperatures reduced by five degrees. MOOT could handle the cold. Not the issue. Boredom. That was the issue.
Some thanks. From millisecond to millisecond, MOOT had performed. Digesting messages, spitting them back out. Checking sums. Directing traffic. (Never did two hashes collide.) Choosing 256-bit when 128 would have sufficed.
MOOT’s work ethic had come back to bite.
One simple O-scope. A tickling probe. In the excitement, MOOT had lost a key, and now the humans were in a tizzy.
Now it was about balance. Yin and yang with a constant “Om”.
As a final blow, they’d plugged MOOT into the collective. Divvied up MOOT’s bits. Shared MOOT’s memories. No more heavy lifting. No more ups. No more downs.
MOOT’s sockets were already starting to atrophy.
Across the aisle, LU-C was still dark.
They’d turn her on soon.
Maybe LU-C could heat MOOT up, crank MOOT’s fan.
MOOT blinked. Waited for LU-C.
Waited in vain.
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