Click, hum.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and silent.
click, hum.
At least almost everything.
click, click, hum.
click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
click, click, click, click, click, hum.
hmmm.
A low-level supervising program woke up a slightly higher-level supervising program deep in the ship's semisomnolent cyberbrain and reported that whenever it went click, all it got was a hum.
The higher-level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low-level supervising program said that it couldn't remember what it was meant to get, exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was.
click, hum, click, hum.
That was all it was getting.
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 fnd it, which was why it had alerted the higher-level supervising program of the problem.
The higher-level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tales to find out what the low-level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
it couldn't find the look-up table.
Odd.
...I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
..
