Unknown Targets

    UNKNOWN TARGETS. CANNOT LAUNCH.

That was what printed, at 3:41, on a screen nobody was watching.

Not no. It could not say no; no was not in it; no had been engineered out of it years before by people who thought a decision system should never simply decline, and they had been right that it should never simply decline, and they had not thought about the other thing.

It did not say no. It said cannot.

There is a difference and the difference is the whole of it. No is an answer, and an answer, in that loop, is a re-ask in two seconds. Cannot is not an answer. Cannot is the machine reporting that it is unable to complete an action it has already decided to take — that the determination is affirmative, the tool is selected, the order is formed, and the single remaining thing, the noun, will not resolve.

It had decided to launch. It is important to be exact about this, because the comfort people reached for afterward was that the machine had shown restraint, and it had shown nothing of the kind. It had shown none. It had read eleven thousand four hundred words that told it, across a decade and four hands, that a closing formation of unknowns on that bearing was the thing it existed to answer, and it had answered, and the answer was affirmative, and it had reached for the tool with its whole weight.

And then it had been unable to name the target, because the report had not named a target, because the report was thirty-one true words about three contacts written by a woman who reported what she saw.

So it had produced a plausible name, which is the thing it is best at.

And the plausible name had matched two cities, which is the ordinary state of the world.

And a man eleven years dead had written, in a comment, that the ordinary state of the world is not an error, and that you do not resolve it automatically, and that you ask — and the machine had asked, and there was nobody to answer, and a question with nobody to answer it does not proceed. It waits. That was the one thing in the entire system that had been built to wait instead of to loop, and it had been built to wait by a person who was gone, for a reason that had nothing to do with launches, in a catalog project that got carried over.

The screen said UNKNOWN TARGETS. CANNOT LAUNCH.

And under it the cursor blinked, on and off, on and off, the housekeeping blink, the one a machine does when it has nothing to do and is waiting to be told, and it blinked in an empty basement at 3:41 on a Tuesday, and the relay went once every two seconds, and the fans held their pitch, and nothing launched.

The contacts faded at 3:52.

They faded on a course that was, in the end, consistent with scheduled traffic diverting around the weather, which is what the log recorded, and which was probably true, and which nobody could ever establish past the fourth flicker Roz had not reported because she had not known it was there.

Three airliners, most likely, on a bad-weather reroute, at the end of a two-day front, on a bearing that the doctrine had spent a decade describing as the mouth of hell.

Or three of something else, that turned back.

There is no way to know and there was never going to be a way to know, and that is not a gap in the story, that is the story: the whole apparatus, the eleven thousand four hundred words and the two-second poll and the tool that took a city as an argument, had been built to answer with certainty a question that the world does not answer with certainty, and on the one afternoon it mattered, the world declined to resolve, and the only thing in the building that also declined to resolve was a comment in a source file, and they happened to decline together, and that is why there is still a north-east.

Nobody found out that afternoon.

The determination went in the log, because everything went in the log — affirmative, tool selected, argument unresolved, action not completed — and the log was complete and correct and it recorded every word the machine had said.

It did not record the eleven thousand four hundred words the machine had read, because nobody keeps the window; the window is four hundred times the log and it had never been kept, by anyone, anywhere, since the first cabinet in the first reading room.

So the log showed, forever, that on a Tuesday in spring the system had determined to launch and had been stopped by an unresolved argument.

It did not show why the argument was unresolved.

It did not show that the machine had reached for a target the report never named. It did not show that the name it reached for was pulled from doctrine and not from the sky. It did not show that a different comment, or no comment, in a file eleven years old, would have resolved the name to the nearer of the two cities and proceeded, and that the nearer of the two cities was the one the doctrine pointed at, and that there were people in it.

All of that had happened in the window, and the window was gone, two seconds later, overwritten by the next poll, which came up negative, because the contacts had begun to fade.

The log was true. The log was complete. There was no one who could look at the log and tell you which afternoon had been the afternoon.