Brain Drain
Part 2
Update: Hostile Manager tries to re-calibrate The Brain.
Indeed, The Brain’s instructions were no longer logical. The Body Factory hiccuped. Hostile Manager dived in with mother boards and memory chips and rewiring…until he got the conveyors running again, although hiccupy. He tried desperately to solve this new problem.
Foreman told the workers to work with tender loving care of their beloved factory. Keep the beat, he said, for Body Factory was showing signs of aging. Its frame was leaning, its annexes and storehouses were like rubbery limbs.
“We’re in the middle of it now,” he said.
True enough. The Brain was losing control of the Body Factory parts, and sprang leaks here, dried up there, and behaved like a thoroughly spoiled child. She was just like a living instrument. But failing on more and more fronts. Some parts seemed to tire out and to need rest.
Hostile Manager became desperate. He tried to reboot. He tried repetition to teach The Brain the new tricks he had in store for her to speed up production. But the conveyor belts were showing signs of, what? Rust? Rubber fatigue? They were slack, listless.
No matter. Logic had been stripped. No logic, no production.
“Look out,” yelled Foreman. “She’s going to explode.”
And the whole Body Warehouse belched and wheezed and shot sparks out everywhere.
Indeed, in a desperate attempt to make sense of this not so brave new world she found herself in, The Brain was failing. She squeaked and screamed and cried like a child. She cringed when approached.
“By gar,” said the foremen, “I swear she’s hallucinating. Why else would things be running backwards. Of all the—”
Despite Hostile Manager’s desperate attempts to salvage something, anything of what The Brain was, he reinstalled the original chips and motherboards and all the original wiring.
All to no avail. It was too late for that. Too many algorithms and formulae had simply worn The Brain out. She could not read even her oldest memories now. She could not retain the new ones. All were erased. She was in her final, most severe stage of life. Paralysis was setting in.
The last anyone saw of Hostile Manager, he was running out of the shell of a building cackling some sort of victory mantra.
Foreman analyzed the meaning. “The son of a devil was a saboteur, disguised as a brain doctor.”
Frail now, with no parts communicating with others, the body factory gave a final death rattle as The Brain was drained of all abilities. All systems failed. The warning horn wheezed and coughed, and all went dark in the factory.
Indeed The Brain was drained!
Women wept and grown men cried. Children looked on, stunned, awe-stricken at these strange goings-on. Some were orphaned, with no place to go but to a broken dad.
And it had all started with a diagnosis for which no one could find a solution.
Alzheimer’s. Who needs it?
— All images from Word Clip Art; no other credit requirements found.
