The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) (9 page)

“These gentlemen would like to see me
prescribe a treatment to a patient; and for this example, I think it would be
most useful to find one here at this Facility. I would like to look at the
treatment progress of case number 1011BZ3.”

Instantly, a window appeared with a
line graph indicating some sort of progress across a variety of variables.

“Sid, please add the time index to
these results.”
The two dimensional graph became a three dimensional plane with bumps and dips
across its surface.

“SID, what is your analysis,” she said.

The warm metallic voice didn’t
hesitate.
“The drop in amino-chlorides indicates gene signaling has failed in the
reconstituted nerve endings. The best reaction is to alternate current
treatment with direct insertion of new stem cells.”

“Agreed. Please update the current
treatment schedule, save and close. Thank you SID.”

“Goodbye, Dr. Banner.”

The screen faded to black.

Ryan had been ready to blame the SID
interface for the errors, but after seeing the smooth interaction between SID
and Dr. Banner, he couldn’t see how. There was a perfect discourse between the
scientist and the diagnostic program. If there were an error it would have to
occur between SID and the patient treatment schedule on the Hospital side of
things.

Ryan walked with Jeff back to the
hallway outside.

“Jeff, I noticed that many of the labs
on this floor are using the SID program. Have you ever experienced or heard of
the SID interface making an error, maybe even due to faulty microphones, or any
hardware failure?”

Jeff walked with Ryan a little way down
the hall towards the exit.

“I’m sorry Ryan, but no; not once, not
ever. You have to understand we work with SID everyday. Our work is augmented,
supported and assisted by SID. As smart as the people are here, without the SID
program we would be back to mixing test tubes, and running centrifuges.”

Jeff continued, “I noticed you’ve been
rubbing your arm; judging from the location, it’s probably where you were
vaccinated against Rn186. You should know it was SID who made that vaccination
possible. For years now, IntelliHealth has created most of the inoculations
provided by our world governments; and SID was there for everyone. Including
the very one that is now protecting you and most of the world.”

“And hurting my arm.”

“Yes, that too,” Jeff said, smiling.

Jeff stopped at the elevator, “Trust me
Ryan, we use SID every day for so many things, if there were mistakes, we would
see them.”

“Thanks Jeff. You’ve really helped, and
given me a lot to think about. May I call you, or visit if I think of more
questions? ”

“Sure, no problem. It was nice to meet
you Ryan.”

They shook hands and parted as Ryan
stepped into the elevator.
Jeff had been very friendly and helpful.

There was a lot to digest from this
visit. It also pointed out his need to understand how the prescribed treatments
were received and implemented on the hospital side.
He returned to his office and updated his notes.

He needed to talk with someone on the
hospital side.

That evening, on his way home, Ryan
couldn’t get the image of all those kids waiting in line, at Alex’s school, out
of his mind. He remembered how quickly they were moving. The nurses deftly
moving from one to the next.

He rubbed his arm.
It was still sore around the area of the shot.

It was getting late, but Jeff Sarin was
stuck and couldn’t leave.
Students in the labs upstairs were gearing up for midterms, and the mood was
frenzied and frantic. Dr. Leonard Bender’s labs were no different.

Vignesh, or ‘Jeff’ to his American
friends, had studied under his friend and mentor Dr. Leonard Bender as a
post-grad. When he finished his postgraduate work, he was awarded his Ph.D. and
chose to stay with Bender as his lab director. Some might have argued it was a
career-killer to stay in the same lab where he’d earned his doctorate, but he
was happy here. Besides, his area of interest was essentially the same as
Bender’s and so he was still enjoying what they were doing in the lab.
Usually.

For the most part he didn’t mind the
sometimes, annoying assignments he would get from Dr. Bender. Like having to
meet with that fellow Ryan Dane today. However, it was relatively brief, and
the questions were kind of interesting.

No, that was not a problem.

But this afternoon was different.

Dr. Bender had sent all of the grad
students to him to go over a test which most of them had recently failed.

Jeff had just sent another one off to
make revisions to their paper. He looked out the door at the line of students
that wrapped around the hallway, and then looked at the clock.

It was going to be a long night.

Waving at the door he said, “Next.”
Yes, he loved his job.

CHAPTER 5

“
In the face of an
obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
”
 
-
Simone de
Beauvoir

“A thought, even a possibility, can
shatter and transform us.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

Monday arrived to find Ryan at his desk
still trying to make sense of his visit to the lab.

The research faculty clearly did not
want to be bothered with this problem.

The culture of academia prohibited any
serious questioning of the researchers. It was the same everywhere and
apparently just as embedded here at IntelliHealth. He could go back, but it
wouldn’t achieve anything without very specific questions.

It was possible that the research
scientists could have input their treatment data incorrectly when they were
doing it manually. The chance for human error would always be his first
rational choice. Everyone was capable of mistyping characters from time to time.

Yes, it was possible, but he wasn’t
sure it made sense. If it was a simple typo, the result should error out
thoroughly, not swap one procedure for another. And Jim’s idea for the test
comparisons should have caught an error like this.

What bothered him the most, was that
even the documented mistreatments, came up clean in his last series of tests.

And then there were the prescribing
scientists that used the SID program as the interface for their work.
Ryan set his notes down, and picked up another page.

Maybe SID was dropping the ball
somewhere, either misinterpreting what the researcher had said, or incorrectly
passing the information along.

He didn’t like that idea because it was
what SID was exactly designed to do, a hundred times a second, at similar
facilities across the whole world.
Jeff made a good point.
How could the SID program fail at the exact thing it was designed for, and not
be noticed?

One thing Ryan knew was that if the
scientists were having problems of that sort, they would complain. People would
know.
And after seeing it in action, Ryan was completely impressed. The odds of a SID
failure seemed lower that the likelihood of human error in the manual attempt.

These were his best guesses for
introducing error on the research side of this equation, and both of them
seemed like poor suspects.
He wanted to rule them out quickly.

He needed more information.

Everything he had looked at so far was
from the research perspective. It was time to start looking at the case errors
from the Hospital side. He sent a message to Dorothy Allen asking for a meeting
to discuss his findings, and hopefully get some help.

He also wanted to visit David and Jim.
He needed a way to test the manual entry method for prescribing treatments. He
needed to know if a few mistyped keystrokes could really alter the treatments.
For a real test, it would be good to find a terminal and enter some data. After
mistyping a few characters, he could see how the system handled it.

And lastly, he still wasn’t ready to
give up on the field comparisons.

He’d continue to set up new searches in
the hope that one of them would hit. If they found even one instance it would
prove that a bad entry could make it through the manual input process. Whether
it would actually generate the type of problem he was after was another
question. He was doubtful.

While waiting for Dorothy’s office to
respond, he headed over to talk with David and Jim. On his way there, Theresa
at the reception desk waved at him and called him over to where she stood,
looking at her monitor.

“Hi Teresa, what’s up?”

“Take a look at this message I was
copied on. I think this is your project,” she said.

 
He bent over and looked at where she was pointing. It was a
message from Dorothy Allen to several high ranking administrators and their
assistants.

“Please be advised that another
instance of the unsolved ‘data collisions’ has occurred. A patient
(PT12c332b354a12bh_#12) was subjected to a series of retro-virus (Rtv 2331)
injections resulting in a degraded and inoperable condition.”

The rest of the message was filled with
information about the time, place and details of the patient. He didn’t
understand all of the medical language, but knew enough to get that it wasn’t
good.
He looked at the time stamp, and read 9:43 AM, today.
He wondered when, or if he would hear from Dorothy or Ben regarding this.
Maybe it was circulating around the higher-ups first; it made sense.

As far as he knew, this was the first
treatment error where someone was hurt.
And it sounded bad.

He said thanks to Theresa and continued
on his way to see David and Jim.

When he arrived, they each seemed
involved in their own projects.
“Excuse me, David. Is there is there any chance you might have a minute for
me?”

Pausing to save what he was working on,
David turned back to Ryan.
“Sure, what’s up?”

“Well, I need to rule out the possibility that a researcher could make a typo,
when manually prescribing a treatment, resulting in a different treatment by
accident.”

“Ah, the evil typo. Yes, well that’s
not possible,” said David with a little too much certainty.

“How do you know?”

“Well, anything entered manually by
someone in the labs is re-read by SID. If it doesn’t make sense SID throws up
warning flags. The work entered by the researcher is put on hold until he or
she responds and corrects the mistake.”

“Ok, that’s impressive,” said Ryan,
“but how do you know it
always
works.”

By this time, Jim heard the
conversation and stood up to join them.

“Well, I know it works because SID runs
his own diagnostics, and would’ve alerted us if he found anything wrong,” said
David smiling.

Ryan had always been frustrated with
information support guys that had a blind devotion to technology. How many
times had a person just like David, smart and well-educated, stood before him
and stated that
‘the system couldn’t possibly fail.’
 

It didn’t matter what the system was,
the argument was always the same,
‘It can’t fail because I’ve run the
diagnostics and it checked out perfectly’.

Of course when the system failed
anyway, it would always be the same response,
‘It’s not my fault, it wasn’t
in the diagnostic.’

It was always the same story.
The system diagnostic failed because of something unanticipated, and therefore
not included in the diagnostics. Then the programmer, just like David, would
shrug with no apparent responsibility. They held no accountability when it came
to problems outside their narrow scope of attention.
Doing his best to hide his frustration, he turned to Jim.