From: 36dale42@283East.net
To: assessors@central.net
Subject: Application for re-assessment
I hereby humbly present my case and hope,
that in your enduring collective wisdom, you will accede to my request. I am sure
that you will agree that my record of service has been excellent, my disciplinary record exemplary
and my performance statistics at
worst acceptable, sometimes
outstanding. I acknowledge the extent of the cost associated with my request,
but firmly believe I have ample
years of active service before me, offering me the opportunity to repay
whatever new investment might be needed. In any case, costs incurred can also
be at least partially offset by my
recovery, should that come earlier than I predict.
In my present state, I am nothing
but a burden.
As you know, my name is Dale, my
descriptor 42. I have over thirty
years of service and have regularly retrained and re-skilled. I was built up to type
36 over seven years ago, though I have not had any new hardware fitted for more
than twenty years. When I researched the products
on offer with my managers, we repeatedly
came to the conclusion that the more recent advances in the capabilities of mindset chips
had all been aimed at those requiring access to and processing
of images, sound and other multi-media information. For some time my role has
been purely technical, meaning that
I process information rather than present it. I also access text and numerical sources
rather than multi-media. So we decided, rightly, that the extra cost, re-build
and training time were not worth the marginal benefit that upgraded hardware would provide.
If those decisions have led, inadvertently and unintentionally, to an obsolete
flag being raised on my capabilities,
I would like to take this opportunity to request a reassessment of the advice
and decisions of my line managers over the last two decades. This request
should be considered as separate
from and in addition to the assessment request I detail below. Throughout I was
acting in good faith. It was never my intention to seek less responsibility and lower workloads on the basis of my possession of only older access and processing capabilities.
I should therefore not be held personally
accountable for the consequences of those decisions, which were not mine alone.
After completion
of my training, all of the pre-loadings
were a complete success and I have
always installed downloadable updates
as soon as they have become available. The only exception
to this was last year’s three dimensional production
unit module. I could not install it properly, since the older version of my mindset chips did not completely
support
the interface with thought assumed by the software. Since I am not involved
with innovative design and, for at least ten years, have not once been called upon to specify
a part for manufacture in real time,
neither I nor my manager saw this as limiting.
I have served in several domes,
the current being 283East. For five years I was Chief Engineer in 527West, the
largest dome on earth. All of my service has been on earth, but neither I nor
my managers have ever felt that this reflected anything other than the
essential nature of my work. As above, if my decision not to take an overspace posting
is now interpreted as evidence of
inflexibility or unwillingness to accommodate change, then this would be an
invalid conclusion. My transfer from that highly responsible
position came about only as a result
of the need for a highly experienced
and heavily loaded operator to oversee
the commissioning of 283East, then a start-up
project, the first for several
decades. It was also the first on earth to apply from the start the now universal dome standards
agreed towards the end of the last century. Though 283East has not been a fault-free
project, records from each year of
its existence show that it has steadily become established as a fully
functioning facility. Though it still houses predominantly
types 5 to 16, its year-on-year profile has shown improvement
for the last six years, showing that it is becoming steadily more attractive as
a location for skilled operators. It
also illustrates that developers,
who always have a choice as to where they place
their plants, are increasingly
choosing 283East. I therefore consider it justified to claim part of the credit for creating those steadily improving conditions within the dome.
I have travelled in and out of
283East regularly during my service here and have never before experienced a difficulty of any kind. It was on the
occasion of my last return to 283East that my problem
arose, a problem that took all
concerned completely by surprise. It is this difficulty which now forms the
basis of my formal request for assessment.
I was called to Central for a
meeting. Though most of our communication is electronic, it has been the practice of dome engineers to convene every few
years. The face-to-face nature of these meetings has often provided insights and ideas that have been repeatedly overlooked in one-to-one electronic links,
even threaded discussions. The latter provide
a perfectly sound method of
exchanging factual information, providing
feedback or communicating the technical performance
of our systems. But it has always been during the face-to-face symposia that new ideas have surfaced. It seems that
the dynamic of a larger, paradoxically
less structured gathering encourages and promotes
the exchange and development of
ideas that a purely line individual
would not have the confidence or conviction to air. I know there is research
material to back this up, but I am
unable to offer references, since my newly acquired type
16 mindset does not allow access to the relevant archives.
Obviously the cost of moving people
from all over the world into Central, not to mention providing
for them during their stay, is nothing less than immense. But each symposium has produced
new initiatives and several of these have led to significant and ongoing
efficiency savings everywhere.
At this last symposium I offered a paper on energy re-processing
and recovery systems, facilities to ensure that almost every joule of extracted
energy can be directed towards its intended use, thus achieving minimum
wastage. I had, of course, pre-loaded
the text and all relevant associated documentation into all delegates’ mindsets
some weeks before the conference, a process
that would normally signify completion
of the project and publication of its findings.
But as usual the face-to-face presentation required me to provide
the extra detail that identified precisely
how the system could be best applied and where the greatest benefits would accrue.
Discussion therefore prompted some redefinition and reformulation of minor aspects of the paper’s content. Though I accept
my bias, I remain firmly of the opinion
that the system would have operated
as originally described and that my presentation
of it was competent. The changes
that were incorporated into the specification as a result of discussion merely had
the effect of honing my work to a perfection
that is often not possible for an
individual to achieve, especially an
individual working largely alone in a relatively remote posting.
I accept
that one or two influential delegates asked penetrating
questions about my claims for the system, and I also accept
that some of my conclusions were modified. But the changes were minimal and did
not undermine the validity of my findings. If the recreation I suffered on
returning to 283East came about as a result of reports
from the symposium that questioned
my performance, then I would like to
claim that these criticisms have been both overstated and misinterpreted. I refer assessors to the record of proceedings which by now will be generally
available. Again, I apologise for
not being able to quote a reference, since my type
16 status now blocks my access to the relevant material.
I took the transport as requested at 11am on the morning after the conference ended. Obviously
the ports were all busy and their
bandwidth fully occupied. It is not
my intention to point accusing
fingers at the operators, but I did
feel on entering the terminal that operations
seemed generally rather fraught. Many of those present,
myself included, commented on the brusque and impatient
manner of several staff. I was not one of those who openly
blamed this on inborn characteristics of the human types
represented. I have never allied
myself, my thoughts or my mindset with such attitudes, though I must admit that
here in 283East there is a general and prevalent
tendency to undervalue the contributions, capabilities
and potential of certain
identifiable human types. I have operated in 283East for several years, and I cannot
guarantee that some of these attitudes might not have rubbed off onto my own
mindset. Assessors will be able to judge for themselves whether the associated
motivation coefficients indicate that these are my own thoughts. I remain
confident that they will not rise above mere association, and, indeed,
association at very low level.
Not only were there several
thousand delegates taking pre-arranged
slots, but there were also many thousands of short-term mindsets on their way
to recreation. Again, I accuse no-one of incompetence,
but in such a busy period it would
only have taken a stray thought to mingle two streams, thus causing my problem. I mention this now because, if that was the
case, then somewhere there is a menial with a newly acquired type 36 mindset, and that could be dangerous.
I still have sufficient access to
material to be able to do some research. As a type
16, my access is limited, of course, to historical material, documents that
long ago were assessed as containing no contentious or current content. So I
took the opportunity
of a few minutes down-time yesterday to search for experiences
similar to my own in the past. In
the early twenty-first century, soon after the beginning of the First
Information Age, there was a much lauded opening
of a new travel terminal. Then, of course, travel technology was at a very
early stage of development, so much
so that it still generally involved physically
moving objects around the globe in real time. People
used to stand in line to file onto metal aircraft which had to take off from
and land at specially designed ports, vast fields that had to be large enough for
the craft to accelerate under friction through its wheels in order to generate
a lifting force which would eventually take it into the air. These ports were apt
to become so congested that the experience
of travel was anticipated with
nothing less than dread. And, it goes without saying, the air through which the
craft flew was not toxic in those days.
Travellers at the onset of the
First Information Age even took things with them, physical
objects packed in boxes that also
had to be loaded onto the aircraft. I was surprised
to learn that tourism was already common, though it was a tourism that we would
not recognise. It seems that tourists at the start of the first Information Age
actually took their bodies with them. For centuries, we have regarded tourism
as synonymous with experience, pure experience,
a mental, intellectual stimulus. Centuries ago, people physically
transferred themselves to different destinations. This was seen as part of the experience.
Since that era was well before the creation of dome standards, one can only presume that these destinations were actually
sufficiently physically different to
justify both the cost and the risk. It goes without saying, of course, that the
era in question pre-dated the
necessity of habitable dome technology.
What happened when this particular
new terminal opened was that for
several weeks the systems designed to keep
the travellers and their possessions
together simply broke down. In that
era, systems still relied on a physical
connection between information nodes and, almost unbelievably, on the
mechanical operation of human limbs
to initiate movement. Quite obviously, such systems could not cope and people arrived at destinations to find that their bags
had never left the embarkation airport,
or worse, they had been flown to somewhere quite different.
It is ironic that, in the same
week that the opening of the new airport terminal was such big news, a professor of physics,
an individual whose name has since become synonymous with a particular brand of electronic transit technology, a
name I will not repeat to ensure
this message is not spam directed as
an advertisement, gave an interview to the media. In that interview he claimed
that it was already – in the early twenty-first century! – within the expectations of researchers that protein molecules might soon be transmitted
electronically as information packets
so that they might be moved from one place
to another, effectively being recreated at their destination. This, of course,
became the basis for the mass transit systems of the Second Information Age.
Even quite well into that age, at
least two hundred years after the first successful transportation
of multi-cell life forms via data packet
transmission, it was still fairly common for reconstruction to fail. In the
days of aircraft, there used to be crashes, though of course nowhere near as
many as popular
perception
claimed. They were actually quite rare. But early reconstruction difficulties
were often likened to the historical phenomenon
of the air crash.
Packet transmission glitches were
much rarer than aircraft crashes, however, even in those early days. Fewer than
one reconstruction in twenty trillion went wrong, perhaps no more than a single cell in a human. But if
that single cell was in a critical part
of the anatomy, it could result in non-feasance. Statistics from the era record
a one in twelve point five million
chance that non-feasance might occur. But, given that several billion transits
were being made every year, this resulted in several thousand occurrences of
non-feasance and was the cause of the still prevalent
neuroses we now call transfer apoplexy. I have never suffered from this condition,
and thus reject the possibility that
my recreation was self-inflicted. Nevertheless, thank goodness that our transit
systems are now more reliable.
But since the mindset system is
only two hundred and fifty years old, we have, if anything, suffered something
of a drop in quality compared to those early days. Non-feasance of the physical being is now so rare that it is impossible to gather data on it. There have only been
two cases of faulty physical
recreation on transmission in the last hundred years.
But problems
relating to the faulty recreation of mindsets have been consistently and
naggingly common. I read reports –
albeit unofficial - yesterday that one transmission in two hundred thousand
results in some loss of data. Minor losses, of course, are identified
immediately when the systems re-boot. Missing data is simply
copied afresh when the re-booting
checks for updates. It is a different
story if the extent of the data loss results in an effective recreation. The
resulting mismatch between the scanned reality and the individual’s recorded
and expected identity is too great
for the automated system to sanction, so all such cases are automatically
referred to assessment. The default reboot, of course, has to be the lower
status. This, I believe, might be what happened in my case, though there is still room for
other possibilities.
I took my designated slot at the
transmission office in Central and was sedated an hour after check-in. I took
only twenty minutes to achieve rest and was transported
immediately. As I explained earlier,
the office was inundated and its bandwidth fully occupied.
So the transfer took over half an hour. I was fully mobile only ten minutes
after the stimulus was administered and I got up
to leave reception in 283East
feeling quite normal. I did have some immediate nagging doubts about my memory
since I knew I had presented a
successful paper,
but found that I could not recall any detail of my speech.
You will appreciate that these doubts were momentary, hardly
formed or considered in the few seconds it took me to get up and head for the exit scans. It was, of course,
when I entered the scan that the recreation registered and the barrier dropped. My
identity tag had registered correctly, Dale, 283East, type
36, but the scan had mapped my mindset to reveal a type
16.
Now I accept
that we all age. I also accept the possibility that performance
assessments can be in process and
that they have registered and become live between departure
and the time we retransmit. I also accept
that criticisms of current work could have been lodged following my presentation. But in my experience
ageing or short-term regrading has only ever resulted in a two or three point downgrade. In my case I found myself twenty points down.
The transmission staff were apologetic, but they could do nothing since they
lacked the authority to examine the transport
log. My mindset reboot then took effect and I was recreated as a fully updated type
16. I had left 283East just days before as the dome’s Chief Engineer and now I
had returned qualified and loaded only as a panel
fixer. Though I accept it is highly
unlikely that our systems have made an error, I hereby formally request a
manual check of my recreation. My mindset is now limited to archives at level
one only, a status I have never before had to endure. I cannot even access the
works of literature I read for recreation, since level one archives only allow
individuals to experience popular
culture. I certainly cannot get into the technical areas I used to browse every
day, though I have not found this too distressing since my recreated lower
level activities do not demand that kind of material.
It is my belief that the
addresses on several packets of data
were wrongly assigned during my transmission. I can only think that one of the
migrant menial workers was occupying
the same channel as myself and by some corruption
or thought initiation error packets
belonging to that subject became attached to my stream and vice-versa.
This could have serious
consequences if the menial in question transited to a port
without automatic type scan
recreation. Many places where such
menials operate are served by such
obsolete ports. Many of the outlying
mines or production units, for
instance, still use this equipment,
despite its specific
exclusion in dome standards for almost a century. If that is the case, there is
currently, somewhere in our sphere, perhaps even
in a power generation dome, an
archive level one individual with a newly recreated type
36 mindset. If that individual is also fitted with an enhanced memory like
mine, then he not only has access to technical, managerial and political data at archive level three, he also has
the ability to store and process it
without the personal assessment
rating that ensures he has the mental facility to handle its complexity, its significance or its potential to harm.
It is therefore in the spirit of community and concern that I formally
request a reassessment of my recreation. If as a result of age or performance reports
I merited such a severe downgrading, then so be it. All I can offer as comment
is that effecting such a change on transit seems a rather cowardly way to
announce such a drastic downgrading. If, on the other hand, my level three
archive access has been transferred in error to a level one mindset, then I
urgently encourage the rectification of the mistake. As a type 36, I had access to very sensitive material and
my mindset was equipped with some powerful
retrieval and processing tools. In
the wrong person, such facilities
could be extremely dangerous. I therefore request a formal reassessment and I
look forward to receiving your reply.
Dale42, 283East, type 16 (recently recreated from type 36, Chief Engineer)
I hereby certify that that the
above text was created by the above operator
in my presence at a single sitting
within a screened environment and thus without access to external input. It can therefore be presented
for assessment.
Certified and witnessed by
Wayne82, 283East, type 21 (283East
Local Assessor)
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