Dopecentury XXVIII --- The Plant
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
She took her seat at the little donut of consoles in the center of the factory floor, taking over from operator of the previous shift as she stood and stretched. From her seat she had an unobstructed view down the nearly mile-long length of the factory floor. On both sides, she could hear the whirring hum of the production machinery, set into lines that were referred to by letter: A-E. Each line stretched from one end of the factory floor to the other. Production generally moved to the north, except where there were necessary crossovers and reverses in the lines. Those were the most complicated to control.
Controlling the lines was her job. Or at least she controlled this three-hundred foot section of machines on the A-E lines before they got handed off to another operator in the next donut further on down the factory floor.
Her seat in the donut faced north. It also faced a keyboard set into the console, built to be indestructible with clicky keys that would continue to work through non-stop typing for hundreds-of-thousands of 24-hour shifts. Above the keyboard were a few rows of ancillary switches and dials, but almost all of her plant-controlling commands — all of her work — was typed into the keyboard. Above the switches and dials were a series of large monitors in portrait orientation, all angled for the operator in the donut to view. The monitors were entirely covered with text, some streaming with reported data, others showing command prompts waiting for input, other split into sections with arcane code and configuration files open for editing.
On sitting down, the first order of business was to get caught up on the current state of production. Most operators set up two of the monitors — one in the center for critically important information, and one on the edge for stuff to keep an eye on — for status reports. The previous operator had done so, and she got caught up by scanning the lines of text reporting the status of the A-E lines she was responsible for, as well as the overall status of plant production on the monitor off to the side. She held down a three-key combo and the primary status information jumped to the left-center monitor — she preferred to use the right-center monitor for issuing commands. The long strings of text reporting production rates, machine tooling tolerances, temperatures, and supplies looked generally nominal. The previous operator had left her in good shape for a bit.
She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the plant — a roar mixed with a hum mixed with a regular beat mixed with an irregular melody. Mostly normal, except the D line was clearly running running a bit high. She opened her eyes and scanned the reporting monitor, sure enough the D-line text stream showed it running at 87% capacity. She three-finger selected that monitor, tabbed to that split, and typed in the three-letter command that would show her the history of notes on that line. Earlier that day there had been a fault and the D-line was making up production capacity now.
She switched back to her command monitor, and requested the overview report from each of the 53 separate machine stations she was responsible for. 53 lines of text streamed down the screen, indicating overall status. All but one reported OK. She typed a command to check the one that reported DEGRADED. A higher-than-normal number of pieces were coming out of that machine without being fully punctured by the tooling that was supposed punch a hole through the production material. That was almost certainly a tool head getting dull.
She switched to the next monitor, split open a text editor, searched out the configuration file that controlled the machine line order. A few keystrokes searched and found the control section for the machine with the failing tooling. She edited the line that set the machine active, and switched it to the redundant backup. She saved the file, and off to her right she could hear a winding-down sound as the machine with the dull tooling came offline, and simultaneously the redundant backup whined up to speed. She switched monitors and tapped in a text message to the lineman for that machine. (The ‘linemen’ weren’t all men, but most fount it difficult to get one’s mouth around ‘lineperson’.) She informed them that she had taken the primary machine offline, and the tool head needed replacing.
On her reporting screen, a line of text flashed. The bosses in the control room wanted to see production reporting on the B-line. She paused for a moment and listened to the sound of the factory floor. From her left, she could tell by the tempo and volume (and years and years of experience) that the B line was running around 78% capacity. Flipping back to her control monitor, she issued the command to report on the B-line. With some pride, it came back at 78.6% capacity. She issued the same command again, but added a switch to get the long-form of the report. Text streamed up her console, breaking down the 78.6% capacity by machine and adding in a smattering of other potentially-relevant information about each machine. She tapped up to repeat the command, and added another switch that would pipe it over to the control room.
Everything one might need to know about the machines of the B-line was printed in text on her screen, but the bosses (unless they had worked their way up in the company from operators) rarely knew how to read the text output reports. They were confused by the long lists of numbers, the detailed columns, and the lack of pretty colors.
Instead, the control room was full of computers that received data in text format sent up by the operators on request. The control room computers took that data, reformatted it into various charts and graphical summaries, added color and friendly graphics, and displayed the data for the bosses on large monitors at the front of the control room. There the bosses could argue together about what tweaks should be made across the plant, and then send commands back down to the operators to carry them out. (Nine times out of ten, the operators had executed the commanded tweak twenty minutes before getting the order from the control room. The plant was a marvel of efficiency, if not executive-level cost restraint.)
From her donut, the operator sometimes felt like she was conducting a symphony, where the machines were the instruments (and they played themselves, mostly). Or, sometimes, when she had composed a particularly effective bit of code to implement a change to the working processes of the machines, she felt more like she was composing music for the symphony to play on the fly. When it was a simple change, she could whip up a function in a text editor on one of her monitors and pass it off to the machine that needed to execute it in a matter of minutes. As often as not, she would have to create and pass a few functions with changes to machines that fed or received materials from the machine she was making the key change to. In those moments, where she was making adjustments to a set of machines that might affect how one whole line functioned — and typically, when executed by the machines, would be accompanied by a change to the noise-music of the factory floor — those were the times that really felt like creative acts. Creative acts carried out entirely in arcane text and symbols. But what was music, if not that?