Intelligent Designers
Nov. 20th, 2011 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolZane kept pressing the '777' button in the elevator. It was annoying Howard and Lydia both. Yes, the elevator had a lot of stops to make. And yes, the everpresent glow that seemed to permeate everything in the elevator made it difficult to be sure that the button was, in fact, lit up. But pressing it every five seconds wasn't helping. They snapped at the same time; Howard grabbed Zane's arm and shook his head; Lydia patted Zane's back soothingly.
All three were on edge. They were meeting with the clients. Meeting with the clients wasn't a fun prospect, not like it had been at the beginning of the project. There was too much water under the bridge. Mistakes had been made, mostly in the area of effective communication and few in the area of ineptitude, or at least that was the stand that the attorneys had recommended. The clients, it was said, weren't happy. This was perfectly clear to everybody. Why else would they be asking to meet directly with the design team, even though the product had been rolled out long ago?
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened onto a blindingly lit boardroom. A long table stabbed accusingly at the trio in the elevator. The clients were all arrayed on the far side, in front of a huge picture window that overlooked a cloudscape. Zane, Howard and Lydia walked out into the vast space. "Gabriel," said Zane warmly. "How are you?"
Gabriel didn't reply. He was the only member of the client team who was sitting. He sat at the head of the table, his massive wings outstretched, and glowered. Zane swallowed. This was not going to go well.
Uriel pointed at the three chairs at the near end of the table. "Sit," he demanded. Zane and his team did as they were asked. None of the clients looked happy. They squared their briefcases and waited. In his overstuffed chair, Gabriel stirred.
"The Almighty," he announced in his rich tenor, "is not satisfied with the product of your labors."
Zane spread his hands. "If we have failed to meet a deadline…" he began.
"Don't play the innocent," barked Gabriel. "This isn't about time. This is about quality. Humanity is irretrievably broken, and God would like to know why."
Howard reached into his briefcase and removed a stack of stapled pages of PowerPoint slides. He got up and handed the stack to Azrael. "If you'd be so kind as to pass those around your end," he said awkwardly. Azrael stared at Howard and made no move to pass anything to anybody. Howard blinked rapidly and sat back down.
"Those are reports from the factory tests we performed," stammered Howard. "The table on page two lists defects that were encountered in a number of the production runs…"
The stack of paper in Azrael's hands suddenly burst into flame. There were consumed in an instant, without smoke or ash being generated. They were simply gone. Gabriel leaned forward.
"The brokenness of humanity," said the Messenger of God carefully, "is not a production problem. It is endemic to the design. This is what has so distressed the Almighty. The Almighty is perfectly capable of producing life of remarkable complexity, but He chose to outsource the task of designing Mankind to your firm, which won this bid over three other companies owing to your qualifications and experience with projects of this sort. It was His intent that by giving this project over to your firm, you could give it the attention to detail that it deserves. The Lord felt that the scope of His current responsibilities was too great for Him to be able to avoid… simple errors."
Lydia spoke up. "We received a list of design comments you and your team generated during design," she said. "I assure you, we combed through that list and incorporated all of your comments into the design…"
"Did you?" asked Uriel. "I do not agree. Consider, for example, the very first item on that list. I quote: THOU SHALT CREATE MAN WHO SHALL WORSHIP GOD ABOVE ALL ELSE. I ask you: have you, in fact, created a race of Man who uniformly worships God?"
"In matters of free will…" started Howard, but he wilted under the glare of Gabriel.
"I tire," purred Gabriel, "of designers who take bugs and attempt to sell them as features. Clearly Man does not worship God. He chooses not to, or prefers to dicker over trivial details of the worship of God as more important than the worship itself. I'm sure your 'free will' represents a very interesting experiment in matters philosophical, but that is not what the Almighty has paid you for!"
"Well, there are a few things to say there," said Zane smoothly. "First, our lawyers have pointed out that we don't presently have a legal definition for 'shalt'; it's not clear that it's synonymous with 'shall', and could conceivably be viewed as optional…." He held up a forestalling hand as Gabriel's eyes bugged out.
"But the more pressing issue is, have you factored in the numerous design improvements that we made over and above the basic design we were given?" continued Zane. "We've added considerable value to the design beyond the scope of what our fees were supposed to cover. Look at what we did with Woman, for instance."
"Yes, let's," said Uriel gelidly. "You were instructed to make Man in God's image, and then take from him a rib and make him a companion. I'm telling you: first, Man doesn't look a thing like God. I don't know what you were thinking when you whipped up that 'penis', but that's the least dignified limb I've seen since the Angler Fish. Second, with a fifty percent divorce rate, it's unclear whether you were trying to make Woman a companion or an adversary. And Third, Man still has all his ribs, so where did you get Woman from?"
"We built her from the same genitive basis as Man," said Lydia stubbornly. "There were good reasons for this, important matters related to design aesthetics. It was unclear to us why removing one of Man's ribs would be important when there were other…"
"We needed Man to be lacking a rib!" Uriel shouted. "It's not your place to ask why; it was part of the original design specifications! What kind of outfit are you running, anyway?!"
Gabriel put a calming hand on his underling's arm. Suddenly the senior angel looked very old and very tired.
"Listen," said Gabriel, "the problem, on the highest level, is that we have failed to deliver what our customer needs."
"Customer?" Zane was caught off guard. "You're our customer."
"We're your client," corrected Gabriel. "Our customer, in turn, is Mankind – the very product you have procured. When the Almighty developed this project's requirements, He wanted to be sure that Mankind knew where he came from. He wanted to be sure that Man saw, in his own design, too much forethought and too much deliberate intelligence to be able to doubt the existence of God, to believe in alternate crackpot theories like evolution. The problem is, the design is flawed."
"It is not flawed!" said Lydia hotly. She was in charge of the aesthetic of Man, and the development of the design was very close to her heart. "Man is a flawless whole. He knows, thinks, builds, develops, learns, reproduces, feels. In the absence of the Almighty, he could pass for the Almighty on his own. You may not agree with all of his design features, but there is nothing about Man that doesn't work!"
"Oh really?" said Azrael, his basso profundo dangerous. "What about the security flaws, then?"
"There are no security flaws in Man," said Howard.
"Tell that," said Azrael, "to the Dark One and his use of known exploits. There's Greed, Sloth, Envy…."
"Those aren't security flaws, those are facets of the human experience!" yelped Howard.
"Again with bugs and features…" muttered Azrael.
Gabriel pounded on the table for silence. "I don’t care how we got to where we are," he said, looking around the table as much at his own people as the trio of designers. "I care about making the Almighty happy. He can be very difficult when he doesn't get what he wants." He turned and stared down the table at Zane.
"When," he asked, "can we have a patch ready?"
Zane blinked. He really ought to discuss this with production first, he thought, but he was on the spot. He needed to give Gabriel an answer.
"Seven days," he said confidently. All the angels groaned.
"The Almighty made the universe in six!" hissed Uriel.
"Sure, but we have a holiday coming up," said Zane. "There's limits to what we can do. Listen, give us until the end of the week at least. We'll address the free will thing, we'll try our best to close all the security problems…"
"Try?" growled Azrael.
"Look, there's a million demons out there constantly looking for new exploits," complained Howard. "It's unreasonable to expect us to make an unbreakable product when there are new sins always cropping up. Planking, for instance. Who saw that coming?"
"….so Friday morning, we'll give you a Man-patch, and I'm confident you'll be very, very happy with the results. And so will the Big Guy." Gabriel's eyes went stony at 'Big Guy', and Zane decided now would be a fine time to conclude the meeting. He stood up, and his team got up too.
"All right!" said Zane, clapping his hands together briskly. "Great meeting! Glad we could all get together like this. We'll call in the next few days with an update. Bye, everybody!" The designers walked quickly for the elevator and got in. All the angels were still staring at them. Howard mashed the '1' button and didn't let go; this time Zane and Lydia didn't stop him.
"We'll need at least ten days for this kind of a change," muttered Lydia under her breath. "They're going to crucify us in Production."
"And self-determinism is at the core of Man's ego!" hissed Howard. "I'm not even sure this is possible!"
"Then we'll do what we always do," said Zane. "We'll give them a few bells and whistles, flag the big, difficult stuff as 'in progress', and then charge them for additional services. We've lost our asses on this contract already anyway, as I'm sure you're aware."
"How do we get out of this situation?" said Lydia in despair. "I just want to move on to the next project!"
"I don't know," said Zane. "But that's how you play the game. Sometimes there isn't a big central plan for things. Sometimes things don’t come together perfectly."
Howard was still mashing the button. Zane stopped him gently.
"Sometimes it's enough," he said, "to not think too much, and just hope it's going to come out all right."
All three were on edge. They were meeting with the clients. Meeting with the clients wasn't a fun prospect, not like it had been at the beginning of the project. There was too much water under the bridge. Mistakes had been made, mostly in the area of effective communication and few in the area of ineptitude, or at least that was the stand that the attorneys had recommended. The clients, it was said, weren't happy. This was perfectly clear to everybody. Why else would they be asking to meet directly with the design team, even though the product had been rolled out long ago?
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened onto a blindingly lit boardroom. A long table stabbed accusingly at the trio in the elevator. The clients were all arrayed on the far side, in front of a huge picture window that overlooked a cloudscape. Zane, Howard and Lydia walked out into the vast space. "Gabriel," said Zane warmly. "How are you?"
Gabriel didn't reply. He was the only member of the client team who was sitting. He sat at the head of the table, his massive wings outstretched, and glowered. Zane swallowed. This was not going to go well.
Uriel pointed at the three chairs at the near end of the table. "Sit," he demanded. Zane and his team did as they were asked. None of the clients looked happy. They squared their briefcases and waited. In his overstuffed chair, Gabriel stirred.
"The Almighty," he announced in his rich tenor, "is not satisfied with the product of your labors."
Zane spread his hands. "If we have failed to meet a deadline…" he began.
"Don't play the innocent," barked Gabriel. "This isn't about time. This is about quality. Humanity is irretrievably broken, and God would like to know why."
Howard reached into his briefcase and removed a stack of stapled pages of PowerPoint slides. He got up and handed the stack to Azrael. "If you'd be so kind as to pass those around your end," he said awkwardly. Azrael stared at Howard and made no move to pass anything to anybody. Howard blinked rapidly and sat back down.
"Those are reports from the factory tests we performed," stammered Howard. "The table on page two lists defects that were encountered in a number of the production runs…"
The stack of paper in Azrael's hands suddenly burst into flame. There were consumed in an instant, without smoke or ash being generated. They were simply gone. Gabriel leaned forward.
"The brokenness of humanity," said the Messenger of God carefully, "is not a production problem. It is endemic to the design. This is what has so distressed the Almighty. The Almighty is perfectly capable of producing life of remarkable complexity, but He chose to outsource the task of designing Mankind to your firm, which won this bid over three other companies owing to your qualifications and experience with projects of this sort. It was His intent that by giving this project over to your firm, you could give it the attention to detail that it deserves. The Lord felt that the scope of His current responsibilities was too great for Him to be able to avoid… simple errors."
Lydia spoke up. "We received a list of design comments you and your team generated during design," she said. "I assure you, we combed through that list and incorporated all of your comments into the design…"
"Did you?" asked Uriel. "I do not agree. Consider, for example, the very first item on that list. I quote: THOU SHALT CREATE MAN WHO SHALL WORSHIP GOD ABOVE ALL ELSE. I ask you: have you, in fact, created a race of Man who uniformly worships God?"
"In matters of free will…" started Howard, but he wilted under the glare of Gabriel.
"I tire," purred Gabriel, "of designers who take bugs and attempt to sell them as features. Clearly Man does not worship God. He chooses not to, or prefers to dicker over trivial details of the worship of God as more important than the worship itself. I'm sure your 'free will' represents a very interesting experiment in matters philosophical, but that is not what the Almighty has paid you for!"
"Well, there are a few things to say there," said Zane smoothly. "First, our lawyers have pointed out that we don't presently have a legal definition for 'shalt'; it's not clear that it's synonymous with 'shall', and could conceivably be viewed as optional…." He held up a forestalling hand as Gabriel's eyes bugged out.
"But the more pressing issue is, have you factored in the numerous design improvements that we made over and above the basic design we were given?" continued Zane. "We've added considerable value to the design beyond the scope of what our fees were supposed to cover. Look at what we did with Woman, for instance."
"Yes, let's," said Uriel gelidly. "You were instructed to make Man in God's image, and then take from him a rib and make him a companion. I'm telling you: first, Man doesn't look a thing like God. I don't know what you were thinking when you whipped up that 'penis', but that's the least dignified limb I've seen since the Angler Fish. Second, with a fifty percent divorce rate, it's unclear whether you were trying to make Woman a companion or an adversary. And Third, Man still has all his ribs, so where did you get Woman from?"
"We built her from the same genitive basis as Man," said Lydia stubbornly. "There were good reasons for this, important matters related to design aesthetics. It was unclear to us why removing one of Man's ribs would be important when there were other…"
"We needed Man to be lacking a rib!" Uriel shouted. "It's not your place to ask why; it was part of the original design specifications! What kind of outfit are you running, anyway?!"
Gabriel put a calming hand on his underling's arm. Suddenly the senior angel looked very old and very tired.
"Listen," said Gabriel, "the problem, on the highest level, is that we have failed to deliver what our customer needs."
"Customer?" Zane was caught off guard. "You're our customer."
"We're your client," corrected Gabriel. "Our customer, in turn, is Mankind – the very product you have procured. When the Almighty developed this project's requirements, He wanted to be sure that Mankind knew where he came from. He wanted to be sure that Man saw, in his own design, too much forethought and too much deliberate intelligence to be able to doubt the existence of God, to believe in alternate crackpot theories like evolution. The problem is, the design is flawed."
"It is not flawed!" said Lydia hotly. She was in charge of the aesthetic of Man, and the development of the design was very close to her heart. "Man is a flawless whole. He knows, thinks, builds, develops, learns, reproduces, feels. In the absence of the Almighty, he could pass for the Almighty on his own. You may not agree with all of his design features, but there is nothing about Man that doesn't work!"
"Oh really?" said Azrael, his basso profundo dangerous. "What about the security flaws, then?"
"There are no security flaws in Man," said Howard.
"Tell that," said Azrael, "to the Dark One and his use of known exploits. There's Greed, Sloth, Envy…."
"Those aren't security flaws, those are facets of the human experience!" yelped Howard.
"Again with bugs and features…" muttered Azrael.
Gabriel pounded on the table for silence. "I don’t care how we got to where we are," he said, looking around the table as much at his own people as the trio of designers. "I care about making the Almighty happy. He can be very difficult when he doesn't get what he wants." He turned and stared down the table at Zane.
"When," he asked, "can we have a patch ready?"
Zane blinked. He really ought to discuss this with production first, he thought, but he was on the spot. He needed to give Gabriel an answer.
"Seven days," he said confidently. All the angels groaned.
"The Almighty made the universe in six!" hissed Uriel.
"Sure, but we have a holiday coming up," said Zane. "There's limits to what we can do. Listen, give us until the end of the week at least. We'll address the free will thing, we'll try our best to close all the security problems…"
"Try?" growled Azrael.
"Look, there's a million demons out there constantly looking for new exploits," complained Howard. "It's unreasonable to expect us to make an unbreakable product when there are new sins always cropping up. Planking, for instance. Who saw that coming?"
"….so Friday morning, we'll give you a Man-patch, and I'm confident you'll be very, very happy with the results. And so will the Big Guy." Gabriel's eyes went stony at 'Big Guy', and Zane decided now would be a fine time to conclude the meeting. He stood up, and his team got up too.
"All right!" said Zane, clapping his hands together briskly. "Great meeting! Glad we could all get together like this. We'll call in the next few days with an update. Bye, everybody!" The designers walked quickly for the elevator and got in. All the angels were still staring at them. Howard mashed the '1' button and didn't let go; this time Zane and Lydia didn't stop him.
"We'll need at least ten days for this kind of a change," muttered Lydia under her breath. "They're going to crucify us in Production."
"And self-determinism is at the core of Man's ego!" hissed Howard. "I'm not even sure this is possible!"
"Then we'll do what we always do," said Zane. "We'll give them a few bells and whistles, flag the big, difficult stuff as 'in progress', and then charge them for additional services. We've lost our asses on this contract already anyway, as I'm sure you're aware."
"How do we get out of this situation?" said Lydia in despair. "I just want to move on to the next project!"
"I don't know," said Zane. "But that's how you play the game. Sometimes there isn't a big central plan for things. Sometimes things don’t come together perfectly."
Howard was still mashing the button. Zane stopped him gently.
"Sometimes it's enough," he said, "to not think too much, and just hope it's going to come out all right."
