:SENDING UNIT FAILURE
:UNABLE TO PROCEED WITHOUT LOCAL PERMISSIONS
What in the Friskies™ Fish Flavored Fucksticks™ does that mean? I had about a thousand hours on this piece of equipment and had never, ever seen that error message or even anything formatted that way. In fact, the popup had a button marked "PROCEED" instead of the usual "OK".
I punched backwards and got nothing. I dumped and reloaded the overview and user panel but got nothing. I really didn't want to drop the box, since sometimes even warm booting could take ten or fifteen minutes because of all the firmware in the peripherals. I tried the key command that wasn't in the manual anymore, but had been left in for people who learned the machine when it was still being born, and those trusted to use it responsibly. Nothing. I was going to have to drop the box.
"1-1, 35, equipment issues, dropping the box, will advise."
"1-1 copies."
There was a little old school LCD readout on the side of the bulky Pelicanized unit, which fed to a small snake of cables, which fed to the weird little monitor and keyboard attached via tired Velcro to the otherwise blank station I was hunched in front of while the bird screamed around me in a hot turn. The LCD was five lines, and a typical display might read
POWER OK
BATT OK
HUB OK
BOOT OK
but for the time being, it said
CALL
STEPHEN
and I was so confused for a second that I froze with my finger on the hard power button while I tried to make sense of it. As I mashed the hard button I cursed Stephen, whoever the fuck he was, and when I realized the box was so fucked I was going to have to yank the power cord, I cursed his entire lineage.
The flight deck punched onto the intercom channel I normally pulled them into when I wanted something so they could tell me we had 57.5 minutes of fuel at our current rates. The radio was fucked, but I had a tenuous connection to the ground team on Sat Charlie via a line of sight relay to some extremely expensive Cold War era recon bird with nothing better to do. They had been passing updates to me on our replacement, which was still brokedick. We had originally been the pre-assault bird, but when word came an hour before switchover that they weren't going to be on time, the ground forces commander had opted to proceed with us on a fuel available basis.
The Task Force had been chasing this target for a year or more. He was an evil motherfucker, and he was smart. I hadn't seen the guy's full profile, but word was he'd been trained by ISI and was more or less off their leash and doing his own thing - human and drug trafficking to fund the exploding of civilians and elected officials.
As the assault started, word came of further delays, which kept racking up as the assaulters moved closer and closer to the target compound.
The clock was ticking, in a bad way, and now my gear was taking a dump I'd never even seen before. It appeared to me that Stephen was at fault, whoever the FUCK he was, but as he was not to hand to answer questions, and the assaulters started hitting the edge of the tactical maps, I was going to have to do whatever I could.
Do you remember that badass moment when the naked T-800 rolls up on the biggest, meanest biker in the place and demands his clothes, his boots, and his motorcycle? And the biker is so struck by the absurdity of this outsider, this unbelonger, who is so wholly outside of his rightful place and is making outrageous demands? And the biker just laughs and laughs, and then gets his shit kicked in by a cybernetic murder unit?
I wish I could tell you I felt that way standing outside the small, but prestigious for its privacy, office of a particular Major. I was not a 300 lb slab of Cyberdyne Systems robo-flesh, I was some fucking dipshit that the adults for some reason turned loose with the minister's chop hand scrawled on a scrap of wastepaper. I was nonetheless an unfamiliar face and in a place I most certainly was not, by the Major's usual understanding, supposed to be - particularly with a loaded weapon showing a little red dot on the slide and a uniform without any name on it.
"Excuse me, sir, good morning, I was told I could find you here," I had said to the Major as he walked up to his office. Engrossed in his morning coffee and whatever hard copy he had in his off hand, he hadn't noticed me posted up outside his door until I spoke.
He looked very perturbed over his AH-64 mug and manila folder, but after giving me a once over, rather than laughing as the incongruities struck him and putting out a cigar on my chest, he decided that I almost certainly represented some kind of trouble that he wanted to go as far away from him as possible and as quickly as possible.
"What can I do for you...?" he hesitated, not knowing what formula of address that military courtesy might dictate.
"I'm Airman Abdul Nuristani, I'm looking for a particular piece of equipment and all I know right now is that it passed through this facility."
Well, this was the Major's facility, as far as anyone was concerned. He was the boss of the unit in charge of operating this particular airfield and all of the buildings and vehicles and people that made it work, from the fuel bunkers to the jack shacks. Normally, a junior enlisted person with missing equipment in a warzone (or anywhere for that matter) did not go looking for a superior to whom they could announce their dire predicament, let alone the highest ranking permanent party in the place. In fact, this was an inversion of the normal order of things - that is, to lie, deflect, and conceal until doing so was no longer possible, or until a replacement had been acquired and the problem became someone else's.
An astute and experienced authority, when presented with such an airman, would immediately deduce that they were dealing with a mere errand boy. Given that this particular one was seemingly intentionally wearing the wrong clothes and was somehow trusted with a hot weapon inside the wire, it could be deduced that this particular errand boy answered to someone of exceptionally grave authority and influence.
I had in my pocket a piece of paper with a phone number on it. After I had been given my instructions (to go find the gear whatever it took and get it to where it needed to be by the looming deadline), I was given that piece of paper and told to call it if I had any problems, or if anyone had any problems with me. I did not recognize the phone number proper, but I did recognize the prefix, and knew it went somewhere in the big building I didn't ever have a reason to go inside.
I very much hoped I would not have to call that number. The fear of the unknown is the strongest kind of fear.
Much to my delight, the Major simply asked, "What do you need from me, Airman?"
I hard cycled the gear and it came up OK. I was waiting on software when the ground team asked for a lock.
"System coming up, will advise on lock."
"1-1 copies."
I watched the notifications scroll by and hovered my finger over where I knew the right button would be. I could run this system with my eyes closed. I sometimes did. Some missions were boring as fuck and the only thing that happened from start to end was the machine would make the kind of beeps I didn't have to open my eyes for.
Copying mission files... Loading parameters... Initializing database... Establishing hardware connection...
And I popped the button and the machine did the dance, peering into the darkness and telling me what it saw.
"1-1, 35, target locked, refining grid."
"1-1 copies."
I watched the CEP refine and out of the corner of my eye I could see the assault team moving up. They'd taken out a sentry without incident and were moving towards the primary compound, a ramshackle assortment of mud buildings connected by an irregular 10-foot wall, set halfway up the side of a shallow valley ringed with narrow draws.
As the CEP refined I watched the centerpoint track back and forth over the course of two or three minutes, critically eyeballing the slowly shrinking outer border and the location of the centerpoint, on-the-fly interpretation of the quality of the link and the reliability of the grid, auguring the finest details in the pigeon guts.
As it approached actionable parameters, I prepared to make the call down, and as my finger hovered over the radio key I watched the centerpoint zip off towards Africa at approximately the speed of sound as the CEP grew to encompass most of the Roman Empire at its peak geographical heft.
CALL
STEPHEN
"1-1, 35, no good, will advise."
A long delay.
"1-1 copies no good."
And I cursed.
The Major picked up his desk phone and called someone to tell them to bring his truck and a driver.
"Let me know if you need anything else," he said, and I thanked him, and waited outside his office. About fifteen minutes later a Staff Sergeant walked by me into the Major's office with a long sideways glance, and abruptly walked right back out to show me to the truck.
He didn't ask me anything except where to next over the course of the next few hours as I determined that the gear was nowhere it should have been, and nowhere it shouldn't have been.
He dropped me off at the flight terminal so I could figure out who to badger for flight records, and three hours later I was tying myself down to the floor of a packed-full intra-theater cargo flight to repeat the cycle.
My tenuous Sat Charlie connection came back up and I was able to jump into a chatroom where I knew I could find someone who was physically present in my home operations center, so I could ask them to find an old head.
I pulled the flight deck up on intercom.
"Hey, co, can you go out of seat?"
"Yeah, what do you need?"
"I need you to come back here and be hands while I troubleshoot."
He pushed his way back to my part of the tube with his headseat on his head and the bare plug in his hand. I pointed him to my seat and he plugged in.
"Hey so I have troubleshooting running in that chat, I need you to read and type for me while I fuck this box."
He gave me a thumbs up and sat down.
The next ten minutes was him relaying between me and the old head as they walked me through exactly the procedures I had already done, and to the exact same effect.
"1-1, 35, continuing to troubleshoot."
"1-1 copies."
"They're breaching the compound," the ball operator said. "Everything's good so far."
Bad sleep after shitty food and two airlift birds later, including one on a very interesting twin engine that resembled nothing more than a C-130 during some middle instar, before it had grown into its full bulk and before it had developed its full complement of engines, I found the units. Someone had finally noticed them on a full empty/full load turnaround and recognized enough of the cryptic markings to know that they should be kept safe until someone came looking for them.
After confirming the numbers on the tamper seals, I carted them back to the air terminal so I could take them where they needed to be. I hoped the mission operator who was supposed to fly them would meet me at the airfield for a direct handoff, so I could just ride the circuit back home and get there in time for BBQ chow.
When I checked in to confirm I'd recovered them, I was told there would be no handoff - I'd be putting them in the bird and flying the mission. It was a bird without the hardwired panels, and I'd never had to run the stick-ons before. There wasn't any manual, but I knew where they needed to point and would have a little while in the air to figure out how to compensate for any misalignment by adjusting the orbit.
"They said they never heard of it either," the co said. "Wait, they asked if that's Toilet Seat."
"Correct," I said, looking at the label on the Pelican.
A moment later he said, "They said they don't know about the special mission boxes."
I half-stood from my crouch and crabbed around to look over the co's shoulder at my station. As I was reaching around his neck to type, a question from the old head.
Did the box not get reflashed from the last time they used it on the other birds?
The majority of what was inside the Pelican was an enormous FPGA and a stack of nonvolatile memory. They were set up for use in a particular system and typically stayed that way for a lifetime, but there were certain mission profiles that were flown so infrequently that a few boxes were set aside to share among them. Toilet Seat was one of them, and was supposed to have been returned to its ordinary configuration before being put back into general circulation.
It was also supposed to have actually been put back into general circulation, and not cast loose into Uncle Sam's Pizza Delivery - and yet.
I had all of the necessary shit on my mission laptop, but it took at least twenty minutes to flash the box.
"They're on it," the ball said. "Looks like they're starting the roundup."
I tugged the co's shoulder and he jumped out of his seat. He was already moving back to the flight deck as I pulled up some diagnostics. My mission software was able to connect to the box, so it meant the main load on the FPGA was probably fine. I'd been able to lock, so it meant the hardware controller was probably fine.
I pulled up some diagnostics and started comparing version numbers. When I got to the values for the piece we just called "the third brick", because there were three of them, and this one didn't have a label on it, the version field was blank.
"Please," I said to nobody but the hum of the turboprops, "Please."
There were two different pieces of mission software, two different suites of management software, two different control surfaces to achieve the same goals. It was a matter of personal preference which one a given operator used. Most opted for the newer stuff, with better UIs and better accessibility, with better map support and simpler workflows for the most common tasks. The old heads almost universally used the old stuff, because it's what they knew, and because it worked with any mission load.
The management software, the new stuff, was one button more or less. Put the combined firmware load, itself a gzipped collection of individual firmware files, in the right directory if it wasn't there already, pick it from some drop downs, and click go. They didn't even bother demonstrating, much less explaining, the old stuff in the schoolhouse anymore. Too complicated. Not considered to be field level maintenance.
But a full flash took twenty minutes that I didn't have.
C:\> "C:\mission files\fw\flash.exe -o"
>GLOBOCORP SUBSIDIARY FIRMWARE UPDATE UTILITY - v1.16
>PROCEED WITH CAUTION
>read
>READING...
>E01 FPGA... OK
>E02 HW CTL... OK
>E03 IF CTL... OK
>E04 ACC CTL... ERR
>READ COMPLETE
C:\>
And I can hear the ball operator on Sat Charlie calling squirters, people fleeing the target compound, talking to 1-1. What a nightmare. In that terrain, on their home turf where they knew every fold and shimmy, the fastest lines in any direction, it would be a circus at best trying to account for them all with the limited resources to hand.
"35, 1-1, do you have correlation?"
He's asking if we can tell if any of the squirters are our target. It is a very specific request with very specific meanings. He is asking for a kind of divination, word trusted as that of One Who Knows What Cannot Be Seen.
"1-1, negative, troubleshooting."
There's no correlation without a lock. There's no lock with brokedick gear. There are only so many eyes, too few to follow them all.
"I'm coming wide, trying to keep them in frame," the ball says over intercom.
"Working," I say, busting open the zipfile, and going off the edge of the map. Nobody ever taught me this shit. I taught it to myself. I'm making it up as I go.
C:\>"c:\mission files\fw\fwflash.exe -i -f E04 ACC_FW.FW
>GLOBOCORP SUBSIDIARY FIRMWARE UPDATE UTILITY - v1.16
>PROCEED WITH CAUTION
>READING E04...
>E04 ACC CTL... ERR
>PROCEED TO FLASH E04 WITH ACC_FW (13.6KB)?... Y/N
13 kilobytes, a minuscule fraction of what it takes to do the FPGA. In theory, it should take a lot less time than a full flash.
"Please," I say, "Please."
>Y
>E04 FLASHING...
Even if I brick this machine, it's broken anyway, and even if it's send-it-home broke, I'd rip it out of the cargo track and throw it out the fucking door if I thought it would help, and ten seconds later it's
>READING E04...
>E04 ACC CTL... OK
>VERIFYING E04...
>E04 ACC CTL... OK
And I'm punching it down, and dragging up the old suite, closer to the metal, thirty seconds faster to initialize, less smoothing on the calcs, jerkier resolution disorienting to the new and the mediocre but I can read it like a trick metronome and see motion in the shape of the ellipse before it even starts dragging the centerpoint I AM a fucking wizard and this is my scrying ball, and
please, please, please, and
Trons burning the air now, projecting me outwards and sidewards into the ether, and the tether connecting me to my empty body is the curly headset cord, and my third eye is open now, and it's rolling around in its socket to pierce the crystalline spheres and divine the flickering auras, and
go baby go baby go baby go baby and
the third eye blinks and focuses, sliding far away along the whorls and eddies of the trons, and
i see them all every one of them with its own color and shape a world made of kaleidoscope and they fly by like cattle faces passing by the railroad crossing in a beef town i see the aurora fingerprint of each and every one but i only want the one and
there it is. This mother fucker is mine.
"1-1, 35, target is locked, full match, standby for resolution."
"1-1 standing by."
And I watch the ellipse as it gyrates, and it passes the reporting threshold, and I'm calling down now, my voice a distant will from a mind still hovering above, impulse sliding down the curly cable, electricity live in the neurons bridging through the spine to the diaphragm, acoustic jump of the air gap in front of my lips limited by the speed of sound in slightly less than one atmosphere, liberated by the electret on the boom of the headsets, liberated again to the speed of electrons pushing wire and out into the gleaming ears of distant orbits, "1-1, I have a grid. No movement. I give you ten meters and falling on 42 Sierra Whiskey Delta..."
Two days later, I was halfway through writing a supplement to the operator's manual, and needed a break. After a debrief with the rest of the senior operators, and another with the ops supe, and another with Globocorp's field rep who only just about had a grasp of the spec sheet, I'd been asked to break everything down into a checklist that could be followed blind if necessary.
My e-mail dinged while I stood in front of the rickety electric kettle and flicked the packets of instant coffee like packing a coffin nail.
Eyes reflexively scooting over the FWD: FWD: FWD: in the subject line, I zipped through the body.
"..desperate action by the mission operator in spite of equipment failure allowed confirmation during the assault, resulting in capture of significant enemy personnel and materiel."
Desperate indeed.
I scooted back to the top.
"Abdul, wanted you to see this. GFC from the op is very pleased and wanted everyone to know. Looks like he went way up and it got passed back down to us through the chain. Good job."
The sig block was my detachment commander's. The original recipient was the general two jumps above him.
When it was time to go home, they gave me a medal citing, among other things, shoving that nasty gear into the wrong bird and forcefeeding it its own guts. I put it right next to the medal that says I'm saltier than the seabed and the one that says I somehow didn't get caught driving drunk or raping a local.
We eventually found out who Stephen was, at least in principle. When the bad box went pissing up a rope, it grabbed some long-forgotten test hook from the infancy of the system, never meant to be seen outside of the development process, and, presumably, by people who had Stephen's phone number.
The mission gear had names in addition to serial numbers, because it was a lot easier to ask about Toilet Seat than Unit #0098235. When Toilet Seat went to the great depot in the sky, we named the replacement Stephen.