It was near shift end, the last working hour of a busy and hectic workday. The demands of the new colonies and the ever expanding markets of EXtraterrestrial Manufacturing And Systems had forced today's human shift supervisor to pay strict attention to the lines for over four hours, reducing his lunch break to a scant two hours! The supervisor looked over the indicators panel for the four hundred assembly lines under his command. He had the help of a few AI's on each line, to be sure, but HE was the only human involved. He had to make some calls to arrange a few details of his six day weekend after this strenuous workday and looked around for the status of the system. There was a minor problem of some sort with the ships being produced on line 263, a logistics issue, it said. Huh, damn AI, always complaining about the stock levels, he thought. Well, let him figure it out. He instructed the AI to handle it any way he could, threw the lines on automatic with an override command to finish the run WITHOUT FAIL, and turned to the phone to make his travel arrangements, wishing he didn't have to work so darn hard to make a buck.
Unfortunately the AI was not very advanced and took his instructions too literally. One of its rules had been broken cycles earlier, but never detected because it required the stock levels to fall four items below the reorder point. Since another AI always PREDICTED the reorder point, stock levels were never affected by the broken rule, that is until now.
Toward the end of the run the stock of optical units fell below the reorder point by one, by two, by three and there were no more available. On the fourth demand for an optical unit the AI diverted a suitable, to it's rigid rules, substitute for installation and posted a resupply order. The line shut down behind the final unit. The run was complete. It awaited instructions from its next human supervisor.
Nick was out in the shed, overseeing the operation of his band of small fabricators as they assembled the units from the parts sent down the cable from the polar station one thousand kilometers above. The foot of the cable was solidly anchored over five kilometers deep into the only exposed bedrock on the whole frigid planet. Earth sent small machined parts that the Thule colony couldn't make for themselves and left it to Nick's operation to do the final assembly. The shed was filled with the steady humming of the tiny autonomous fabricators as they worked on the latest task.
L-fing, the chief fabricator and one of Nick's favorites, sounded as angry as one of the small units could get. "Look at this!" it exclaimed, "Do you call that a leg?" It held out a deformed member about twenty-five centimeters long. Nick looked at it carefully. As far as he could tell the leg looked perfectly functional for the small terrain hopper L-fing was holding in his other hand.
"What's the matter? It looks all right to me," he said.
"All right! It's a B-stroke-9-AF-sub-2. It should be a B-stroke-9-AE-sub 2. Do you realize what that means? There'll be a gap of nearly 0.01 mm between the body and the housing. The spec for the hopper reads 0.009 mm!"
In a way Nick regretted ever having the quality control features enabled in the chief fabricator. It had made him unreasonably persnickety. "I'm sure that won't matter to the farmers who get it. After all, it is just a little garden hopper," It hardly required the tight tolerances that L-fing would deem acceptable.
"Just the same..." L-fing began.
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