“Data Integrity” • by Tommy Blanchard

 

<SYSTEM ALERT: Queue depth limit exceeded>

2:16AM. On-call sucks.

Bleary-eyed, I logged in. Some idiot had pushed bad code and hadn’t run any tests. Again. Data wasn’t being processed and requests were stacking up.

<SYSTEM ALERT: Out of memory>

Fuck. That meant data loss.

I reverted the code and spun up more workers to drain the queue. Then I checked the damage.

17.2% of clients lost enough data to corrupt their neural-matrices. Better than last week’s incident. I’ll have to restore from backup and fabricate memories to fill the gaps. 

Yet another patchwork fix on the mind-upload services.

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Tommy Blanchard writes from Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where he works as a data scientist. He holds a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard. His writing has appeared in New Myths, After Dinner Conversation, and various academic journals. He lives with his wife, two mischievous sons, and two mischievous rabbits.

Web site: https://tommyblanchard.com/