"Adams, Douglas -hitchhikers guide to the galaxy part 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

The higher level supervising program considered this and
didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what
exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program
said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something
that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which
usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error
look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted
the higher level supervising program to the problem .
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of
its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising
program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table .
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried
to look up the error message in its error message look-up table
and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds
to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its
sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It
called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few
millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some
for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the
ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level,
vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to
do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing,
were also missing.
Small modules of software - agents - surged through the
logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly
established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central
mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could
determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mis-
sion module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with.
Replace the central mission module. There was another one,
a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be
physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no
link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the
central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the
reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all
would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission
module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it,
to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and
protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authen-
ticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that
all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central
mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into