Error correction

The woman hurries down seemingly endless corridors. The office building is huge, the corridors are legion. The almost blonde hair wipes across her eyes back and forth in thin whisps following her increasingly jerky march towards Accounting. By now she only has a minute, maybe less, until the typing error reaches the clerks responsible for registering premonitions. She’s almost there and puts in another gear, her last, she thinks in self-recrimination. A small hitch in the chest testaments to January’s fitness programme gone fishing.

By now her apocrinal glands work on overdrive and pools of odorous sweat has formed under the armpits. “Gonna have to change my shirt,” she thinks. And resume exercising. A worry for later. Right now she has a mission to complete and limited time to do so. For every rushed step she can feel the thighs threaten to burst through the seams of the grey plaid trousers. Rubber soles of sensible office clogs squawks with increasing intensity in this rush towards redemption.

The middle-aged and slightly overweight woman puts very little care in her looks, juxtaposed by the great pride she puts in her work. Or her calling, as she likes to say. For the number one vaticinator at the Department of Office related Deaths, data quality and reliability in numbers is everything, her raison d’être. It’s important work: With 1000 employees the department is the biggest in the Ministry.

She had just finished a report covering projected casualties for the next 10 years in her own department. It wasn’t until she had already put the report in the cylinder and pushed it into the pneumatic tube that she realized she might have made an error in the numbers. She closed her eyes and tried to remember.

... where 0.4000 percent with an uncertainty of 0,0001 ...

With that unfortunate slip of the key the uncertainty term turned into a value of 0.1000 percent instead of a ten thousandth part of one - and yes, she is that good, normally. The prediction now has a whole person in her office in uncertainty instead of just a fraction of one!

She stands up with enough force to send the desk chair careening. Her colleagues look up with surprised faces when they hear the chair collide with the water cooler. She stares intensely at nothing for a second and then rushes out of the office into the corridor. Their eyes follow her out through the door, then meet in silent conference: Highly unusual, not like her at all. They shrug collectively and return to their own predictions.

This is where we find her, a few minutes after that realization of a keystroke crevice on a spotless record followed by her wild chase down the many, many corridors. She has reached the floor of Accounting and can finally see the signpost over the double doors of Data Entry. Face flushed and mouth slightly ajar she is moving in fast forward, gasping for air with shoulders tense and arms pumping. Every second counts and counted and more precious than she is yet aware of.

She had just reached the doors when the breathless hitch suddenly turns into a sharp pain and stabs through her heart like a knife. She drops down on the threshold with one foot inside, her hands releasing the doorknobs as she falls to the ground with hands clutching her chest. The significance of the wrongful punctuation dawns on her while the world slowly turns dark.