Forgotten Experiments
"Forgotten experiments" occur every so often at FAIT, despite
the lab staff's best efforts to prevent them. The usual cause of a forgotten
experiment is an overworked lab technician, who has worked for two or more
consecutive shifts and whose mental state is beginning to resemble that
of a "volunteer". In these circumstances, the lack of attention
to details can cause the technician to forget a small but all-important
procedure usually performed with every setup: engaging the Session Monitoring
Loop. This subroutine adds the experiment's realtime status data to the
display in the Control Center, allowing monitoring by FAIT's 24-hour Control
Team. The SML is there to keep the Team apprised of the current state of
each experiment, and notifies the Team of critical changes in the subject's
physical or mental state via audible and visual alarms.
If the SML is not engaged by the technician, the experiment is monitored
only by the FAIT Cube, not by any human technicians. The eventual
result is that the subject is left connected into the virtual world indefinitely
in some forgotten corner of the mammoth underground complex, and finishes
out his or her days in virtual space, expiring when the life-preserving
metabolants run out, or sometimes even sooner, if the psychic shock threshold
is exceeded.
Although such a subject is yielding no further data, his experiment
and subsequent untimely death provided valuable data for the FAIT Cube,
which has incorporated this data into its experiential database for use
in current experiments. Someday, a wandering janitor or lab worker seeking
a room for a new research project will run across this grisly reminder
of the value of following procedures to the letter.