Chapter 30 Chapter Thirty: A Restless Rama Night

Nicole sat alone in her tent at Camp Beta, unable to shake the horrified face of Wilson's mutilated face in her mind.She tried to make herself think of something else. "How did this happen?" Her heart was trembling, "What else will Rama do now?" Outside, Rama was plunged into darkness again.Three hours ago, Rama's lights suddenly disappeared again. Judging from the lighting time, it was 34 seconds shorter than the previous one.Originally, the extinguishing of the lights should have aroused everyone's discussion and speculation, but no one paid attention to it, and everyone remained silent.Wilson's terrible death weighed heavily on everyone's heart.

The regular meeting of the astronauts after dinner was also postponed until the next morning, as lengthy meetings between Brown and Heilman and ISA officials on Earth continued.Nicole was not at the meeting, but she could guess its contents without a second thought.Now, she understood, the operation was facing a real failure.After witnessing this bloody scene, the mere public cries would have ruined it all, as everyone witnessed the most horrific sight...   Nicole imagines, in Beauvais, Genevieve sitting in front of the TV watching Wells being torn apart by the crab-shaped creature.This is too scary for a child.Suddenly, she blamed herself for being selfish: "What's really scary is that the Wilsons saw it all."

After the roster was finalized, she met with Wilson's family twice.Nicole still remembers the little boy named Randy.He might be 7 or 8 years old, he has beautiful big eyes and likes sports.He showed Nicole his 2184 Olympic album and asked her to sign her name on the women's triple jump page.As he thanked her with a laugh, she reached out and tousled his hair lovingly. Nicole sadly imagined little Randy watching her father die in front of the TV, and she couldn't help it anymore, tears welled up in her eyes. "Son, you've been through so much this year, so many nightmares," she thought. "It's been a year turned upside down. First the joy of my father being chosen as an astronaut, then the absurdities of Frances and the horrors of my parents." Divorce, and finally this unforgettable tragedy."

Nicole was so sad and depressed that she couldn't sleep.She wanted to find someone to accompany her for a while, so she went to the next room and knocked on the door lightly. "Who's outside?" She heard someone ask inside. "Hello, Takagishi-kun," she replied, "It's Nicole. May I come in?" Takashi opened the door. "It never occurred to me," he said, "is it a work visit?" "No," she replied as she stepped into the hut, "it's a private visit, I can't sleep, I think..." "You are welcome anytime." He smiled friendlyly, "You don't Need some reason." He stared at her for a moment, "I'm sorry for what happened this afternoon, I feel responsible for it, I didn't do my best to prevent..."

"Don't do that, Mr. Gao An," replied Nicole, "don't think so, you don't have to blame yourself. At least you said something, and I, as a doctor, didn't say a word to discourage it." She looked at Takashi's small room.Beside his cot, on a small piece of cloth spread on the floor, stood a small white statue with black spots on it.Nicole knelt down and looked at the statuette curiously. "What is this?" she asked. Dr. Gao An was a little embarrassed, and picked up the statuette with his hands. It was a chubby oriental man. "This is a treasure handed down from my wife's natal family, and it's made of ivory."

He handed the figurine to Nicole, and said: "This is the head of the gods, called 'Buddha'. It turned out to be a pair, the other is a female god, called 'Guanyin', now in Kyoto my wife In the past, when there were many elephants, many people collected such small Buddha statues, and my wife has quite a collection at home." Nicole carefully studied the small Buddha statue in his hand.The smile on the Buddha's face is full of compassion, kindness and infinite peace.Nicole recalled the beautiful face of Mrs. Takagishi who was far away in Japan, and thought of the intimacy and tacit understanding between their husband and wife. Things will become much easier to deal with."

"Sit down a moment, please," said Dr. Takagishi. Nicole sat on the box beside the cot.They talked for 20 minutes, mainly about their respective families and relatives.Although they also alluded to this afternoon's misfortune, they avoided dwelling on Rama and Newton's actions.They all need to use the memory of life on earth to dilute everything in front of them. "Now," Gao An drank the tea in his cup and put the cup on the small table, "I have another strange request, Dr. de Jardin, can you go to your cabin and get the scanner, I want to do a scan."

Nicole smiled, but immediately looked at Dr. Gao An with attention. Obviously, the expression on the doctor's face was serious.A few minutes later, she returned with the scanner. Gao An told her why. "In the afternoon, I felt two stabbing pains in my chest, just after Wilson collided with the crab-shaped creature. I was very excited at the time, and I understand..." He didn't finish his sentence.Nicole nodded and turned on the scanner. For three minutes, neither of them spoke.Nicole was shaking her head as she checked all the alarm data, charts, and heartbeats. When she was done, she gave him a helpless smile and said, "You had a mild heart attack, maybe two, very close together. Since then, your heartbeat has been irregular." It can be seen , he had expected this situation a long time ago.She had to tell him: "I'm sorry, I brought you some medicine with me, but this is only a temporary emergency measure. We must go back to the Newton immediately and carry out the necessary treatment."

"Then..." He forced a smile, "If our estimate is correct, Rama's lights will turn on again in twenty hours, let's go." "Perhaps," she replied, "I'll talk to Brown and Hellman about it right away. I think we'll be back on the ship first thing in the morning." He took her hand and said, "Thank you, Nicole." She turned away, weeping again.Nicole left the hut on the high bank and walked towards the edge of the camp.She needs to talk to Dr. Brown. "Oh, it's you!" In the darkness, she heard Richard Walkerfield's voice, "I guess you must have not slept. I have some news for you."

"Hello, Richard," said Nicole.She saw the silhouette of a person reflected in a ray of light in the darkness. "I couldn't sleep," he said, "so many horrible images kept popping up in my head, so I just finished the task you gave me." He smiled, "It was easier than I expected. Could you please come to Come to my room and I'll tell you?" Nicole had been thinking about how to tell Brown about Gao'an, and a puzzled look appeared on her face without turning her head. "Remember? Look at you," Richard reminded her. "It's about the software of the surgical robot and the manual input of commands."

"Have you figured it out?" she asked in amazement. "Right here?" "Of course, I just need to ask O'Toole to pass down the data I want. Come on, let me show you." Nicole decided to go to Dr. Brown later.She was walking side by side with Walkerfield, and as they passed a tent he knocked on the door and called, "Hey Taburi, guess what I found. I saw a lovely lady wandering in the dark , would you like to chat with us?" "I told him something earlier." He turned to Nicole and said, "Your tent light was dark just now, and I thought you were asleep." After waiting for nearly a minute, Gallows got out. He recognized Nicole and smiled at her. "You fellow, Walkerfield, don't take too long," said he, "I'm half asleep." Arriving at his cabin, Walkerfield detailed what had happened unexpectedly when the Newton jerked violently. "You're right, Nicole," he said, "that there were human commands entered into the surgical droid that did disable the automatic protection. Also, these commands were entered while Rama was moving." Walkerfield kept smiling, watching Nicole to make sure she could follow his train of thought. "Apparently, when Gallows fell, his fingers touched the main controller and touched the command key three times. At least the robot thought so, and the command given to it was repeated three times, which is exactly what the regulations require. Of course, this Pure baffling coincidence, but the robot doesn't see it that way." "You see, this is a software designer's nightmare. No one can predict all possible situations. Designers can avoid certain wrong operations by protecting the settings of the program, because anyone may accidentally touch some key. However, the situation of several consecutive wrong operations is too rare. More importantly, in the whole system design, manual commands are used to deal with emergencies, so it has the highest priority in the software structure of surgical robots. The priority is always executed immediately. According to the design, after the system rejects a 'wrong' manual command, it should jump to the next priority command, which is the automatic protection command." "I'm sorry," Nicole said, "I don't understand why a design that can reject one wrong order can't reject several wrong orders? The orders are no different." Walkerfield tapped a few times on his laptop, brought up a program, and said, "Here's the sequence of commands for that time, one after the other, where human commands are inserted and the robot executes." with a place. "They keep repeating," Gallos said, "every seventh program." "That's right," Walkerfield replied. "The surgical robot processes the manual commands three times before executing them. The software works exactly as designed..." "But why did it carry out that order in the end?" Tabry asked. "Because the software designer never expected that there would be repeated wrong commands. In fact, after the robot detected the manual command three times, it skipped the pre-arranged surgical procedure, locked the automatic protection system, and executed the manual command. " Walkerfield explained patiently. She didn't quite understand what the two of them were talking about, like buffering instructions or queue structures, because she hadn't learned much about autoprotect or repeating instructions. "Wait a minute," she said finally, "you've got me in the dark again. You know, I'm not an engineer. Can either of you sum it up?" Walkerfield said sorry, "Excuse me, Nicole. Do you know about interrupt-driven software systems?" She nodded. "You're familiar with the system that operates on priority, right? That's good. The explanation, then, is much simpler. The automatic protection interrupt is based on the accelerator, and the imaging data has a lower priority number than the manual command entered by Gallos. The protection software of the system is locked, and it does not Ignore the signal from the sensing subsystem that there is a problem, and just follow the manual instructions. That's why the scalpel keeps cutting and cutting." For some reason, Nicole was a little disappointed.Walkerfield's explanation has been very clear.Nicole didn't want to involve Gallos or the other team members, but the answer was too simple, and Nicole spent so much energy and time in vain. Nicole said, sitting on Walkerfield's cot, "It's incredible." Gallus sat beside Nicole and comforted her: "Cheer up, Nicole. This is good news. At least we can be sure that our initial settings are correct. We now have a sense of what happened. logical explanation." "Excellent," Nicole said sarcastically, "but General Posov is dead, and so is Reggie Wilson." Nicole thought of Wilson's strange behavior in the past few days, and the early days when she and Frances During some conversations, she blurted out: "By the way, did you hear Bosov complaining about his headache or other physical discomfort? Especially on the day of the banquet." Walkerfield shook his head: "No." Gallos asked her strangely: "Why do you ask this?" "I consulted the portable specialist diagnostic instrument," Nicole replied, "I entered Posov's physical data to find out the possible causes of his symptoms, and it came to a very strange conclusion: generally, it was not appendicitis, And it's more likely a drug reaction, 62 percent. I thought, maybe he took some kind of drug that caused the adverse reaction." "Really?" Gallos asked curiously, "Why haven't I heard you say this before?" "I've been to you . . . several times," Nicole replied, "but I don't think you're interested. Remember? I was in your room on the Newton the day after Posov's death, just After the all-hands meeting. I can tell from your reaction that you don't want to bring it up." "Man," Gallos shook his head, "communication between humans is a real problem. I just have a headache and nothing else. I can assure you that I didn't say anything that I didn't want to talk to you about waves. The meaning of Soph's death." "Well, I've communicated with you now." Nicole stood up and changed the subject, "Before going to bed, I have to meet with Dr. Brown and Admiral Hellman." She looked at Walkerfield , thanking him, "Thank you very much for your help. Now, I think I should feel a little more relaxed." Nicole walked up to Gallos and said, "I'm sorry, friend. I should have investigated this matter with you, and that might have led to the cause more quickly..." "It's okay." Gallows smiled and replied, "Don't think so much. Let's go, I have to go back to sleep too." Nicole approached the cabin and heard loud conversations inside before she knocked.Brown, Hellman, and Frances are arguing over how to respond to Earth's final orders. "They're jumpy," Frances was saying. "They'll figure it out after a while. It's not the first time people have been killed in space operations." "But after all, they ordered us to evacuate as soon as possible." Heilman retorted. "So, we'll be contacting them again tomorrow, first explaining why we're surveying 'New York'. Takashi said it's going to melt in a day or two, and we'll have to leave by then. Also, Walkerfield, Takashi and I did hear something that night, although Brown didn't believe it." "I don't know, Frances," Brown was about to say when Nicole knocked at the door. "Who's there?" he asked gruffly. "It's me, De Jardin. I have some important medical matters..." "Look, de Jardin," Brown interrupted her immediately, "we're busy! Can we wait until tomorrow?" Nicole was in no hurry to tell Dr. Brown about Gao'an, she thought to herself: Well, then, we'll wait until tomorrow morning. "I see." She replied loudly, in the tone of the communication.After she finished speaking, she felt that her voice was weird, so she laughed again. Within two seconds of her turning around, she heard the sound of arguing behind her again.She walked slowly back to the small tent. "Tomorrow will be better," she reassured herself as she went to bed.