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Ben took the stairs up eight flights to his office. No one trusted elevators to open doors where or when expected. Some companies were replacing digital controls in elevators with analog controls. The same was happening with traffic controls. Analog controls were less versatile, but they worked.

The Trans-Ports were now operated manually; new analog controls were months away. Fire/police and other first responders, power generation and distribution, fresh and waste water management, and other aspects of critical infrastructure were in chaos since digital controls were so ingrained in their daily operation.

Ben Torrent first checked his flash e-mail. One in particular caught his attention: Fools, discrete digital circuits are
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The beginning is a little overbearing with all the information that is thrown at the reader so suddenly. I had to reread it to really get what you were talking about. Instead of stating all of these things about the setting so abruptly, maybe you could show them through the characters interaction with the environment.

I think one less "analog controls" - three times in the first two paragraphs seemed a bit much.

quote:

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Ben took the stairs up eight flights to his office. No one trusted elevators to open doors where or when expected.

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Maybe say that analog controls hadn't made it into all of the elevators yet, that first responders and other critical infrastructure were the first to be retrofitted to eliminate digital controls. Then get me to the email, which hints at being interesting -- and I suspect it tells me something about the problems with digital systems.

(I'm speaking in the imperative mood, but these are just suggestions, of course.)

Nit: I'd avoid using slashed word combinations (Fire/police) in general prose.

I agree with what others have said, specifically it was the word "controls" that stood out to me. I think one reader's suggestion might alleviate the problem - stick something more in there about Ben first. Skip some of the info dump, deliver the bit about transports working manually and critical infrastructure being in chaos in tidbits during the story. Have things go wrong, or have Ben observe the huge piles of waste and remark to a colleague that the last time they saw a waste-bot through this sector it was autumn...know what I mean?

In the interim, you could introduce us to what it is Ben does, what office he's going up to. The bit about the elevators and the slight exposition about traffic controls is enough to hook us on the concept, IMHO.

There's promise here, but, as is the general consensus so far, a little trimming is in order. The first two paragraphs should almost be merged into one, once the redundant parts are snipped away. Technically, the writing is good - clear, concise, simple. You could step up the language a touch, but that's just me. It feels stark to me.

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I agree there's too much information in the first 13, and it doesn't seem directly relevant to Ben's journey up the stairs.

I'm concerned about willing suspension of disbelief, bearing in mind that the audience for SF probably includes lots of software and electronics engineers.

As you no doubt know, both digital and analog circuits are built from the same basic components - transistors, capacitors and so forth - so it's hard for me to imagine something that only attacks the digital circuits and leaves analog alone. ... Unless it's a digital virus of course, in which case surely the fix is easy - disconnect the digital controls from the networks. ... Or does 'analog' mean going back to vacuum tubes? (That'd be fun.)

These thoughts mean that my 'willing suspension of disbelief' is verging upon unwilling and I need to believe the analog substitution quite quickly to continue reading.

To borrow Deb's lovely phrase, I too hope you have the digital eptness to pull this off. With 'digital entropy' you're making a good start even if that is only a place holder.

If you want readers, I'm in.

Kathleen: discounting the two blank lines, the redacted text is only 11 lines. I'll have to check the Hatrack Experts thread to see if there are any attorneys amongst us .

The stranger who sent the email disabuses Ben of the notion that it was simply "digital" circuits that failed, but were "computing" devices. (Please go back in time and view the original post.) So, the idea was that computing itself had suffered some abstract limitation. Even so, any competent electrical engineer would, after examining enough failures, conclude that embedded computers (microprocessors) or other computers were always the culprit, even if the reason was not known. That conclusion would certainly be reached long before people began ripping monitor and control equipment out of trains and elevators. That is something of a flaw, but a minor one. (That is not to say that the first 13 needs no work.)

The real question is whether it is plausible (using SF standards) that some physical rail could interfere with computation per se (by machine or man). I wanted a physical basis for this, so I sought out a physicist. A very generous one volunteered some strong ideas. I would acknowledge him here if I knew for certain that he would not mind. So . . . I have some hope for this story.

Pat

In this world, the computers were making many/all of the decisions about what action to perform when. Then they got all frigged up. So the computers making the decisions (a common occurence in our world, computers decide when to shift gears in our cars and change the signal at a traffic intersection, much less what to do with this text when I push the submit button, LOL) are the source of the problem. So WouldBe's MC's observations are of people removing the digial decision-making, and probably substituting humans (there could be an interesting side story about the work crisis, that all humans are currently working two and three jobs, after population downturns in the last 50 years due to the fact that computers did so much of the work...something like that...)

In the 70s we were busy replacing the kind of analog controls the story mentions with embedded microprocessors. Part of the appeal, aside from their flexibility due to being programmable, was the increased reliability. When the story went the other way by substituting analog for digital it was hard for me to willingly suspend disbelief.

The thing is not that the digital systems have faults - heck, the software industry delivers gazillions of faults a year and I for one am ashamed of that - but that the control systems all seem to have the same fault. Embedded microprocessors don't do that because they are all programmed by different people and companies. The programming isn't likely to be the common fault, unless they're all using some common software, which is very unlikely (though not impossible): there are even several alternative operating systems for these things.

So if it's not the software, it's the hardware, and since that's all made by different companies too, it's also unlikely to be the problem. Not impossible but unlikely, and not hard to spot.

Hence it seemed to me that something was attacking the silicon itself, and since analog electronics uses silicon too, why wouldn't that be vulnerable also?

But WouldBe knows all this and is focused on computation - both in humans and in machines - so I'm waiting eagerly in hope of seeing the story. Perhaps the story asks, what if two and two doesn't always make four? Or maybe that's another story.

Another idea would be to suggest removing some references to analog and referring instead to manual/aka human-operated. So stick a human operator in the elevator and stuff like that. Yes, less reliable.

For whatever reason, I'm reminded of a commercial for high-speed internet service from a few years back. It was a guy at a computer, and he was surfing the web. Then the computer says "You've reached the end of the Internet. Go back." The joke being the internet service was so fast you could see the whole internet in one evening of surfing.